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the former pope’s authority until a new one is selected and his attempts to help the investigation. That causes the first 20 minutes of the movie to be crammed so full of information that you end up having a bunch of characters in a room telling each other the plot of the film and why such facts are important to the audience. There is a twist here, as there has to be to make the story interesting at this point, but instead of being a big reveal it functions as a half-hearted conclusion to a series of scenes that were never designed to be the backbone of a film. To put it simply, the whole caves in upon itself before it has a chance to get to the heights that were clearly within its reach.
Some of the changes are for the better, no question about that. One particularly ridiculous moment involves a several hundred-foot drop out of a helicopter by Robert Langdon with nothing but a small section of tarp for a parachute. Thankfully, that one got excised from this movie, as well it should have, because what leaves you groaning on the page will inevitably have a worse reaction on screen. These are the changes that had to be made to faithfully adapt the written word and make sense in that context.
The entirety of the plot of the novel has been squeezed into the second act of this film, and both the beginning and ending have changed so radically as to be considered the bookends on an entirely different movie. This is not Angels and Demons, this is Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp’s Vatican Thriller and that sort of hubris is what I take the most issue with. The book could have made a great movie, but now it never will. Is it better than The Da Vinci Code as a film? I’m still not sure on that one, but chances are it’ll be considered an improvement in the long run.
Ron Howard did all he could with the script provided and Hanks is actually a lot better with shorter hair. It’s beautifully shot, and the score also manages to do what it has to do. The funniest part of the whole thing is that the two moments that felt the most right to me, the grand total of 4 minutes of screen time that I wasn’t zoning out from disappointment, weren’t even scenes from the book. It’s obvious they didn’t want to make that book into a film, so call it something else, and write a different movie. Originality is not the sin that the Hollywood has made it out to be, and the sooner they figure that out, the sooner they’ll get back to what they should be doing, making good movies.
Movie Grade: C
Based on the novel 'Angels and Demons', the movie follows world-renowned Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, who is summoned to a Swiss research facility (CERN) to analyze a mysterious symbol seared into the ...
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