by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright May 2009
The acting was nice, the pacing was nice, the story was more fantasy than most Space Operas, such as Star Trek.
Angels and Demons is a thriller based on a mixed bag of conspiracy theories that writer, Dan Brown, trolls from the Internet. He's not too concerned about matching his world to the real world, and it shows. By the time the scene in the Large Hadron Collider is done, ten minutes into the movie, it is clear that this movie's Poetic Licence is going to be very important. So, I'm not going to talk much about the bad science.
What put me off most in this movie was the pacing. For a movie that is mostly about solving historical puzzles, these people were way too fast.
Here's what I mean:
o The movie is over in less than twelve hours, movie time. Langdon gets called from his swimming pool at 6AM, Eastern US Time, and the crisis ends at Midnight Western European Time... and this includes a jet flight from Boston to Rome. Too fast, too fast.
o Langdon has been pushing to get into the Vatican Archives for years, and when he gets in, the one book he know's he's been after for years is the one that solves this mystery. Whoa! And he knows just the specific book he wants? Where's the research?
o Ms. Ventra, the lady physicist, rips a page out of this book rather than taking a minute to copy down a snippet of rhyme? In this circumstance, the page ripping looks like such a Hollywood cleche, what time did she save by doing that? None that I could see.
o The design of the archives was strange and expensive-looking to my eye. And, clearly, the safety proceedures need to be reexamined!
o These people are both researching and rushing back and forth across Rome on an hour-by-hour basis?
o The flunky villian in this suffers the classic "I can work miracles with no resource" problem. This kidnapper/killer is one man, but he can kidnap four heavily guarded, high profile men, then cart them around to various highly public places to torture them in spectacular ways, and kill cops like a movie hero disposes of punk thugs... then dies to a car bomb? Whoa, this character has "Ot-play Evice-day" branded on his chest as prominently as his victims carried their brands.
o His boss suffers, too. He can discover an obsure research project at the Large Hadron Collider that even LHC "top brass" don't know about, and time the death of a Pope to match the culmination of this project? Whew! There's a whole lot of people who'd like to get him doing project planning for them!
o Ventra says, "Not enough battery time left." and Camerlengo, the priest/acting Pope immediately grabs the cannister, and runs out to a waiting helicopter, with a parachute in it, and gets chopper up high enough, and gets the parachute on, and jumps out, and gets low enough... umm... umm... and he planned this?
o Langdon and Ventra watch the chopper, knowing a big bang is coming? They don't duck? So Hollywood, so Hollywood.
o Likewise, so Hollywood, is the gold key that unlocks the final mystery of who the big villian boss is. What? Why a key for his screen? Is the Swiss Guard Chief is the only one who watches the sick Pope? Who watches the Pope when the Chief goes home for the day?
All-in-all, Angels and Demons was entertaining. I liked the pacing of the movie, I liked watching the actors and actresses. But it is rare for me to see an entertaining thriller movie violate space and time, and timing, as much as this one did.
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