MOVIE REVIEW: "Angels and Demons"
BY: LEE RICE
Although the splendor of Vatican City really shines in ‘Angels & Demons,’ the scenery is the only thing that manages to keep the viewers attention away from the undercooked character development, apocalyptic pseudo-science, and mind-sapping exposition.
‘Angels’ is the sequel to ‘The DaVinci Code,’ the book/film that stirred a not inconsiderable amount of controversy with its plot, which concerned a vast conspiracy by the Catholic Church to conceal the fact that Jesus did, in fact, "know" Mary Magdaline and had a child. This time, Robert Langdon, again played by Tom Hanks, is called in by a reluctant church to investigate a threat from the Illuminati during the Conclave, where the new pope will be elected.
The one thing this movie has going for it besides the scenery is the excellent pacing. From start to finish, ‘Angels’ is a high-speed race against time that keeps the viewer engaged as Hanks races through the streets, struggling to decipher the next clue to find a bomb that will destroy Vatican City in the next few hours.
Unfortunately, it is that same break-neck pace that creates one of the films most notable flaws, the fact that there is almost no character development. Even Langdon, despite Hanks’ everyman charm, has all the depth of an inch deep puddle, and this serious lack of empathy with anybody in the film made me more concerned with what the bomb would do to the city itself than the people populating it.
Speaking about the bomb, it is probably the biggest example of how ill-researched this film is. The bomb is actually a large quantity of anti-matter collected from the newly built Large Hadron Collider. That’s right, the film manages to turn the Hadron Collider, possibly one of the greatest scientific achievements of our age, into a doomsday device capable of wiping out entire cities with anti-matter. Sorry to tell you this, but anti-matter just isn’t that good as a weapon. CERN laboratories, one of the leading research labs in the world, has listed on their website that if they were to gather all the anti-matter they’ve produced over the years, put it into a single chamber, then managed to annihilate it with regular matter, the most they would be able to do is activate a single light bulb for a couple of minutes.
I don’t know about you, but I’m terrified.
Really.
I can forgive this sort of wonky science from Star Trek, which exists in the realm of fantasy, but I find that it seriously detracts from this film’s attempts to be a credible thriller.
The final flaw in the movie is that it can’t seem to make up its mind about religion. Often throughout the movie, people bring up how faith is uplifting, and all the good works that the Church does in the hopes of making mankind a better place. Then, in the next breath, it goes right back to telling us what an evil lot of controlling monsters they are and how they all want to stop scientific progress. If the film’s point was that there is a fine line between all the good that comes with faith and all the ill it produces, then I feel that it could have been much better delivered. As it is, the film’s passive-aggressive relationship with faith manages to bring forth some stirring moments, such as a speech by the Camerlengo that echoes my own beliefs on religion’s place relative to science, and some rather confusingly contradictory moments, such as when *spoiler* the same character is revealed to have been behind the whole plot to destroy the Vatican as a way of uniting the church against science.
Although it manages to avoid boring us as badly as ‘DaVinci Code’ did, I doubt I’ll be re-watching this one again anytime soon.
Final Verdict: C+
