Because Wild Celtic Made me Do It

A couple days ago Burning Reels posted a list of little blurbs on eight movies that had seemingly nothing in common other than the fact that he saw them in close enough proximity that he felt they could all be crammed into one post. One of those films was Angels and Demons, which, apparently, I am one of the few people who actually liked it. I said this in the comment section and Wild Celtic let me know, in a much friendlier way than I am used to, that I was wrong in my appreciation of said film. So here is my rebuttal: a posting of my original review from last year. It's from Suite101.com, which means it isn't written in the first person (ugh), but I don't have the non-Suite one saved on this computer so we'll work with what we have.
"Both book and film have caused tremendous public outrage within the Catholic church, which wanted it banned. The irony with this church-related controversy is that it has gotten so huge that people will read the book and see the film just to see what all the fuss is about. If the church wanted to hurt the Da Vinci Code, they would keep quiet about it, and then there would be no hype, no expectations, no reason to see the film other than for purposes of entertainment."

When that was written (by me) about The Da Vinci Code in 2006 it was trying to both stir the pot and skirt around the fact that there wasn’t much to say other than that the film itself was pretty entertaining.

However, now in 2009, with the film’s sequel, those words are almost prophetic. The film, based on the book by Dan Brown, has neither the hype nor controversy surrounding it that the original did and it opened to nearly $30 million less at the box office than its predecessor.

That means that, Angels and Demons’ returns are based, more or less, on people’s desires to be entertained by the intricate yarn it weaves and not any sort of outside cultural force. So, with no pots to stir, here’s the review of Angels and Demons in three words: it’s pretty entertaining.

Tom Hanks reprises his role as symbologist Robert Langdon who is summoned to the Vatican after a terrorist revival of the Illuminati, an ancient enemy of the church, begins running amuck around Vatican City.

Needless to say, Langdon, who has fallen out of favor with the church after the last films events, is their last hope after the pope has died and the cardinals who are set to replace him are kidnapped and will be killed one by one, hour by hour at different locations around the city.

The only way to discover the location of the church where the next assassination will take place: a complex web of ancient symbolic clues of course.

At the end of the maze, in the hidden Church of Illumination, is a canister that contains a stolen entity which is referred to as antimatter. This antimatter is the result of the crashing together of different neutrons and protons and other neat special effects and is considered highly explosive when it comes into contact with normal household matter which is, supposedly, everything that is not antimatter.

Unfortunately for Langdon and his allies at the Swiss Guard, the batteries on the antimatter’s container are running low, risking the complete obliteration of the Vatican. You’d think with technology advanced enough to create antimatter in the first place, there’d be a better means of storage for it than battery powered containers, no?

The official name of the antimatter is “The God Particle.” That’s what passes for irony in Dan Brown’s literary universe.

This is, let’s face it, basically nonsense. To put a description of Angels and Demons in print reads like the product of an overactive imagination trying to pull a complicated inside joke.

But Ron Howard is such a good filmmaker and Tom Hanks is such a good actor that they somehow get away with things that a lesser labyrinth potboiler wouldn’t.

Like the way Langdon, faced with an impossible riddle, looks off into the distance and conjures information that no normal human being, no matter how much passion they have for their field of study, should know off the top of their head, or that maddening way movie killers have of thinking up impossibly elaborate ways to commit their dirty deeds when a simple bullet would have achieved roughly the same effect.

But Howard is a true storyteller. He approaches the plot head on, treating it, not like a preposterous potboiler, but like an honest suspense film. To provide any hint that Howard or Hanks didn’t believe in this material would send it spiraling into chaos and self-parody, but because they approach it with a straight face, and keep the motion kinetic, it’s easy to get involved in the chase.

And like with The Da Vinci Code, Howard knows how to take a waterlogged story and weed out the true excitement in it. Dan Brown is an author whose plots are so complex and so steeped in history that his books sometimes get mistaken as great literature because they give the illusion of waging great debates between religion and culture or science, when really they are just pulp stories masked behind a wall of historical jargon.

Any Brown story can be broken down in several key actions: 1) description of exotic location, 2) heroes talk about plan of action, 3) heroes perform action, 4) heroes talk about performed action, and 5) repeat.

There’s a lot of standing around and talking in the Brown universe, as if time is infinite despite the hero’s constant working against the clock. Howard gets rid of that excess, always finding a visual momentum that keeps the story pushing forward.

And that’s the verdict. Angels and Demons, like The Da Vinci Code, is not a great film, but it gets the job done well enough, raising slight ideas about the associations between religion and science while twisting and turning upon itself so many times that it’s hard to tell if it’s even tied up all its lose ends by the conclusion.

Sometimes, when done well, that’s all anyone needs. It’s this simple: if you liked The Da Vinci Code, the chances of you liking this one are in your favor, and if you hated The Da Vinci Code, well, why read this far in the first place?