Angels and Demons

Review By: Ryan Hamelin
RyanHamelin@TheCinemaSource.com

Movie Grade: C

They didn’t get it… That was my first thought as the credits began to roll on Ron Howard’s latest Robert Langdon adventure. Adaptations are always a tricky proposition when you’re dealing with a literary work. An 800-page book has to make a 120-page script, so obviously the end result will not exactly match up to the source material. In a lot of ways, it’s better if it doesn’t, because as Watchmen so aptly demonstrated, being faithful to ones source material in excess can lead to a film that leaves the a large portion of the audience behind entirely. It is into this realm that Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp step with bringing Dan Brown’s first Robert Langdon novel to life.

If you’ve read the novel, I wish you luck with this movie. It can be safely verified that those who haven’t read the book, or those who have sufficiently forgotten the book by the time they watch the film will find a lot more enjoyment in this one than those of us who actually read the text the movie is based on. Part of my excitement for the movie stemmed from the fact that I actually liked Angels and Demons as a book far better than The Da Vinci Code. Better source material, better movie right? This is what I get for assuming I suppose.

It’s not so much that they don’t use any of the conflicts or serious drama from the book in the movie, it’s that they don’t seem to have figured out what was good about the book in the first place. The centerpiece of the novel is the capturing of the four cardinals most likely to become the new pope. The chase to find each one before their death on each hour starting at 8pm is what made the book a page-turner. Then, when he was out of cardinals, Dan Brown had the girl (a girl who is supposed to be a love interest for Robert Langdon… except now functions mostly as wallpaper) get kidnapped by the big hulking baddie who’s been taking out the cardinals. Not only is she not kidnapped in the film, therefore not leading to any real revelation on Langdon’s part, but the murdering psychopath is a skinny college dweeb with glasses who happens to have impressive firearm training. They also make a bit of a gaff by setting the movie up to be a sequel to The Da Vinci Code instead of a prequel. This leads to a lot of time spent reiterating that the church and Langdon are not on good terms after the revealing of the bloodline of Christ which takes up space that could have been used for, I don’t know, compelling storytelling?

These changes, beyond a superficial level, relegate the main plot of the book to a B plot in the larger film. The A plot then has to do with Ewan McGregor’s progressive priest who has inherited ...