ANGELS & DEMONS by Ron Howard
The next Dan Brown mystery thriller after The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons again tells of an adventure by Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks). This time, it seems an ancient enemy of the catholic church – the Illuminati – have returned with the plan to destroy the Vatican with antimatter stolen from the CERN facilities in Geneva. Accompanied by Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer) from CERN, Langdon must find and follow the Path of Illumination to save four preferiti (the most promising candidates in the ongoing election of a new pope) and to uncover the Illuminati before the antimatter-bomb destroys the Vatican and possibly a big part of Rome.
Angels & Demons suffers from the same problems as The Da Vinci Code – it is much too talky, Tom Hanks solves mysteries that have been kept hidden for centuries within minutes, and the posse scurries from church to museum, from museum to ancient monument, from puzzle to puzzle in a race against time to tick off locations and events from the book within the 138 minutes running-time. What’s missing is the feeling of the weight of the centuries, the depth of ancient mysteries and conspiracies, the monstrous scope of the events – instead Angels & Demons falls flat and is at most two-dimensional.
Just like in The Da Vinci Code the best moments are the last minutes, when the talking stops for a couple of minutes and Ron Howard seems to remember one of the vital rules of moviemaking: Show, don’t tell. Nice soundtrack by Hans Zimmer in those moments though – when you like a mix of the sacral and the bombastic.
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Angels & Demons Movie Trailer