Review - Angels & Demons (2009)

Angels and Demons is the first Dan Brown novel featuring Robert Langdon as the lead, but in the movie adaptation, it is made as a sequel to The Da Vinci Code. Like the previous movie, it is about conspiracy theory related to religion and some extremist.

Tom Hanks and who's that girl again?

For those already read the book, the movie has little to offer other than the location and the art work involve, regardless if it is a replica or the real thing. What that was only described in the book, now we can see it for real.

Robert Langdon is again played by Tom Hanks, this time with better hair, but the female lead, unlike in the previous film, is totally forgettable. Maybe that's because the previous female lead is a part of the McGuffin. As a matter of fact, the way the movie is written, the female lead can actually be written out. But then this will make is an all guy film...

Even if it was a book, Angels and Demons is full or inaccuracies and plot hole. The film can somehow made a few adjustment to make some not so logic plot into a more logical one, but in the same time also created a number of goof on its own.

Remember when was the last major Hollywood film with Vatican City plays a huge role?

In the book, it has mention more about the Illuminati, about the mastermind of the bombing and killing known as Janus. It successfully lead us to think that there is an external force attacking the church, but in the film, most viewer are fast to come to a conclusion that maybe the mastermind is within the church. Thing is, most who haven't read the book before will be mislead into believing the red herring as the main villain, pretty much like the friend I watch this movie with.

For me, it's Godfather Part III, where the conclave also plays a part in it.

Overall, this is a vast improvement over The Da Vinci Code. The former is more like a run, stand and lecture kind of thriller, a lot of static moment, but Angels and Demons reduced this, and most of the exposition take place when the characters is on the run or travelling. And, as Dr House said, walk and talk scene will give an impression that the story is moving. One thing rather disappointing is, the ambigrams moment is very brief, on screen, the burn mark is so messy and most viewer will not realize it is a stylized word that reads the same upside down. Curiously, why the hell the last mark is not the ambigram diamond made up of four elements' ambigram combined?

Still, being a Dan Brown novel, the plot still employs the same trick - two parallel story, one of the protagonist and one of the assassin's movement, coded message and a twist at the end. All four of this novel (two of them are non-Langdon stories) has the same formula, and the code is more or less of the same type. Heard that his new Langdon novel is coming this year, hope it bring us some new surprise.

I was initially a big fan of his work after reading all this work, but when I have read The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason and Umberto Eco's Foucalt's Pendulum, Dan Brown's stories are sort of kid stuff...haha~!