Angels & Demons

I didn’t liked that much the book by Dan Brown that I read after the more famous and non-stoppable reading The Da Vinci’s Code; but the film that is loosely based on the book is great entertainment and perhaps superior to the first installment in the Robert Langdon saga because of great production values, fast (really fast) pace, transforming the story into a crime thriller and a more normal looking Tom Hanks “sans” hair extensions (he, he).

Angels & Demons novel is Brown’s previous work to The Da Vinci’s Code, but in the film becomes a sequel that by the way I believe that all the references made to the prequel are successfully done, as makes sense that now the Vatican is reluctant to full cooperate with Langdon due to his previous “discovery”. The film tells the complex story of the Illuminati taking revenge for what the Roman Catholic Church did centuries ago when killing the four pillars of their organization. Now an assassin has captured four cardinals and proceeds to kill them in the same fashion as what happened centuries ago. Now is about the four alters of science: Earth, Air, Fire and Water and the four Preferiti or the four Cardinals that are the “favorite” to succeed the recently passed away Pope. As you can imagine there is a catastrophe in the making, this time done with antimatter that could make disappear Vatican City and all the Cardinals in the world as they are locked in the conclave to elect the new Pope. Only Robert Langdon can stop “everything”.

Yeah the story in the film is pure fun entertainment and some viewers mentioned something that made total sense to me. This could be a more exciting and faster paced National Treasure installment and you have no idea how accurate this description is; so if you enjoyed the National Treasure films, then surely you will enjoy this film.

The only thing that sort of bothered me is the much time the film spends explaining all the Vatican rituals to elect a new Pope; when you’re familiar with the procedure, those scenes become really boring and you can even catch one or two inaccurate references. But if you’re as many in the world and know very little about the Roman Catholic Church, then obviously the too much information becomes an adequate framework to everything that happens in the story. Also if you understand Latin –which not many do nowadays- you will be distracted by the awful pronunciation, lol!

Anyway this is great entertainment fun that happens to be about the Roman Catholic Church with -in my opinion- innocuous consequences to the real Church, as here everything looks and sounds like elaborated fiction. So I really do not understand all the fuzz –including banning- that some countries and people do (did) against the film.

I highly recommend this movie as good and old-fashioned entertainment.

Enjoy!!!

Watch trailer @ Movie On Companion