Movie Summary of Angels & Demons by Michael The Moviegoer.
ANGELS & DEMONS = **
“Pope Fiction”
The opening scene in “Angels & Demons” involves a secret team of scientists trying to capture antimatter in a small battery-operated glass container. It looks more like the opening scene in “The China Syndrome” rather than what you might expect from a religious thriller set in the Vatican. The container is stolen by a secret society called the Illuminati. When the battery dies, the antimatter will explode like a nuclear bomb dropped on Rome. Only one man is thought to be able to foil this plot. He is Robert Langdon, played by Tom Hanks, and the Vatican police track him down swimming in Exeter, New Hampshire.
Yes, it’s the same Robert Langdon character that Hanks played in “The Da Vinci Code”. Both films are directed by Ron Howard. Both films are adapted from popular novels by failed singer/songwriter-turned-best-selling-author Dan Brown. But where the first film felt like something fresh and original, ‘Angels’ feels oddly like it’s trying to be an Indiana Jones film with Hanks doing what seems to be a Harrison Ford impersonation instead of becoming Langdon.
There are too many unintentional laughs throughout the first two hours, but the final twenty minutes are actually quite powerful. This is one of those rare occasions where we have a thriller that actually has a satisfying finale. We just have to endure two hours of conventional stupidity to get there. It’s like waiting in one of those long lines at an amusement park for a ride that lasts a fraction of the wait time.
Here’s a bit of Dan Brown trivia. When Hanks is first told of the Illuminati, he is shown a logo of that name as an ambigram. That’s a cool font which allows a word or title to read exactly the same if you turn it upside down. In 1995, before he wrote novels, Dan Brown wanted to be a singer/songwriter. He put out a CD of an album called “Angels & Demons” on his own DGB Records label out of Exeter, New Hampshire. The cover art is a very cool ambigram logo of the title “Angels & Demons”. That design is credited to someone named John Langdon. Hmmm!!!! Is he any relation to Robert? And why isn’t this ambigram used for the film’s logo?
DVD Watch: There are a lot of unintentional laughs in “Angels & Demons” due to ridiculous dialogue. If you’re looking for a true comedy about religion, Bill Maher’s “Religulous” is hilarious. Both movies examine the differences between science and religion. Both movies also discuss how December 25 is not the day Christ was born. But in Maher’s film, there are no explosions or car chases, and nobody gets shot, branded or burned.
Michael The Moviegoer
