Angels & Demons

Last night, I saw Angels & Demons. Now I've never seen The Da Vinci Code or read the book or read Angels & Demons, so I was going into this movie with no expectations and no real idea what it would be about. 

The movie begins with the death of the pope and how tragic it is. We get to see Ewan McGregor as Camerlengo Patrick McKenna, the pope's closest aide, smashing the ring of the pope. The scene then shifts to Tom Hanks as Robert Landon randomly swimming in a pool where the Vatican's Swiss Guard pick him up to help them with a kidnapping by the Illuminati, a secret organization in the Vatican. Not only has the Illuminati captured the Preferiti (the pope's top picks to replace him) and they threaten to murder each one of them and by midnight use "antimatter" that they also stole to destroy the whole Vatican. 

The movie is a time crunch of trying to save each of the Preferiti from being murdered and find the antimatter  before midnight when the battery runs out of the container it's being held in. The film revolves around the intricacies of the Vatican and their connections with the Illuminati and how this will help the good guys find each of the Preferiti before they die. The movie is one suspenseful scene after another, so much that when I left the theatre I was speechless for the longest time just trying to regain my consciousness of the non-suspenseful everyday life. 

I was bothered by the couple of instances where they seemed to lose this sense of urgency. This was due to Tom Hanks' character having to constantly spit out all of this trivia about the Illuminati or the Vatican or statues or something equally long and historical. 

The movie was mostly shot well but there were a couple of times that I felt nauseous because they loved spinning the camera around people rather quickly. Although one of the most annoying times was when Ewan McGregor's character said that the world was spinning out of control and then the camera "spins out of control" around him. It made my head hurt. However, it was all resolved at the end of the film where shot after shot was done beautifully.

Without spoiling too much of the film, the cataclysmic  event when the "bomb" goes off was not given very much importance. I mean, if this was supposed to give us clues to how the world might have been created, then it was downplayed more than I thought was necessary. I would of expected all those standing outside to watch the sky where the clouds seemed to be burnt and there was one big shining orb instead of all watching the man parachuting down from the sky. Unless that was supposed to be another symbolic thing, but I'll get to that later.

I was very happy that in this thriller, mystery, trivia-filled movie that it was not followed by a romantic subplot. There were not even a hint that Tom Hanks' character was trying to get with with his sidekick Vittoria Vetra, played by Ayelet Zurer, or the other way around. I feel like too many of these movies feel obligated to have a romantic subplot in so I was glad to see that they deviated from this. 

Speaking of the sidekick, she was almost completely unnecessary, only giving actual good tips of information every so often. She seemed to be there more as a device for us to hear all of Tom Hanks' thoughts than to actually add her own intellect to the situations. 

I will have to say overall, I really did enjoy this film. I thought that the acting was very well done by the main actors in it and I felt that the script actually brought depth to the characters, another matter that I was surprised this type of film would have. The plot itself was very well thought out and there were plenty of twists and turns to keep the audience on its toes. My biggest complaint for the whole film was the overuse of symbolism. We get from the title of the film that the it is going to have some element of the battle between good and evil and how they may be confusing to find in a person. However, the movie would not let the audience stop thinking about it, from the girl dropping an angel that she picks up that has blood on it to the wax statue that reveals something sinister behind it to the many, many instances of statues being used as both angela and demons who are watching everything that's happening. It was probably one of the most annoying uses of symbolism that I have seen in a movie.

Best Moment: The archive scene where Tom Hanks and the guard get stuck in the library and they are running out of oxygen. I loved the use of the eye-cam in this scene to show how much the two men how much energy they had left. This was by far my favorite intense moment as they tried multiple different ways to get out of it, all to no avail. A really, really good scene. 

Worst Moment: It's a tie between the eye-cam and the accent used by the Inspector of the Swiss Guard. I love the eye-cam in the scene described above as it was necessary to understanding what was happening. I did not like every other time it was used in the film, as it would be used when Tom Hanks was running and the camera would just show him looking at the hallway he was running down, so basically not having any purpose to switch to this different point of view. The other thing that really bothered me was the Inspector's accent. I could not tell if he was French, German, Spanish, or Italian. It often felt like he was trying for a certain accent but he kept falling out of it. Thank goodness he wasn't used for the second half of the film.