Angels and Demons is a 2009 film that was spawned by the popularity of an author that became a household name over the course of a couple years. His name was Dan Brown and at least for his first book and film, i was on board with him as both an author and the inspiration behind certain films.
I'm not going to avoid spoilers in this one so if you were about to watch this film because Netflix is featuring it then don't read this because I am not going to hold back
Dan Brown became likely one of the most popular authors seemingly overnight with his release of the book "The DaVinici Code." I read this book, as did most anyone alive at the time in the western world. It was a good book and he deserved the millions of dollars that he got because of making such a wonderful adventure in print.
Despite the fact that The Davinci Code actually takes place AFTER the events in Angels and Demons (in both print and in film) the release of said films was reversed because no one at all read Angels and Demons until The Davnici Code was already an unavoidable presence pretty much anywhere you went.
Dan Brown as an author pisses me off because all of his books are essentially the same story with different characters and once you have read one of them just substitute a few names and locations in and you have the next (or previous) book.
Don't get me wrong: I loved the Davinci Code as a book, but when i read the next book by the same guy and it is the same story it irritates me a bit.
So as you would expect from Dan Brown, this film is a detective-style mystery that one person (in this case Tom Hanks as "Robert Langdon") is able to identify secret things that are part of a great puzzle. In Davinci it was far more slow paced because there was no timeline and in many ways I think that is why that book / film was released prior to this one.
I'm going to go ahead and step into the Pros and Cons of this film because there are a lot of both and if you are trying to avoid spoilers now is the time to leave.
source
Pros
- Due to the fact that this was a huge budget film starring Tom Hanks with Ron Howard as the director, we get a fast-paced tour or Rome and also the Vatican which is filled with scenery that would probably be otherwise filled with tourists or not accessible at all.
source
It has been said that because they were not allowed to access certain parts of the Vatican, the producers actually replicated many of the locations featured in this film - The Necropolis is an area later on in the film that is something that may or may not even exist but they do a really good job of showing this area to us in the movie. Well done, Ron Howard.
- At multiple points in the film the media are shown providing the populous with "fake news" and when this film was made in 2009 that wasn't even a term yet. They can be seen straight up lying and also twisting facts to cater to the particular market that they are broadcasting to.
Unfortunately that is the end of the Pros because the story itself isn't particularly good when you consider the fact that when this film was released almost everyone was already familiar with The Davinci Code and this movie is essentially the same thing.
Cons
The Davinci Code had a slow pace to it where Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) had a very long period of time to figure out the various puzzles that he was faced with. In Angels and Demons he is faced with an identical situation but only had 1 hour between each sequence to figure it out before something awful if going to happen to someone if he doesn't figure it out. It get's tiresome when every single time he puts the pieces together leaving the Italian police and him 10 minutes to get to the scene.
There is one scene where a Cardinal is thrown into a fountain on a trolley / dolly with weights on it that are made to drown him.
Robert (Hanks) jumps in to save the guy and we can clearly see the marked weights that say "10" and there are 4 of them. Now I don't know if these are lbs or kg but honestly it wouldn't matter because of Archemedes's principle. Things are dramatically "lighter" underwater than they are on the surface. There could have been 100 KG of weight on this trolley and an adult human would experience almost no trouble in standing it up. I hate it when films ignore 6th grade science when they are making a film.
A temperature and O2 controlled room has the power cut and despite the fact that this room is the size of a football field, the room runs out of oxygen in 6 minutes.
The entire film is based upon some person somehow gaining access to the Vatican, which is one of the most closely guarded places in the world. When Robert (again, Tom Hanks) finally discovers this underground labyrinth, it is easily accessed and when he winds through the very clearly marked passageways it opens up into a frequently visited room in the main palace which is a DOOR that has the keys on the opposite side. This is absurd. It wouldn't have been discovered at the last minute. This underground lair would have been well-known.
The overall plot of this movie is a grand "switcheroo" played out by Father Patrick McKenna (Ewan McGregor) and he has covered all of his tracks to the point of skydiving from a helicopter in order to prove his worth to Catholics. However, his Achilles Heel ends up being CCTV's in the room where he commits his crime that everyone, including him, must have known that were in the room. This is just weak story-telling because the entire plot was based on some long-planned scheme and the main protagonist commits his crime in front of multiple cameras that aren't even hidden? Come on....
Overall, this film made a ton of money but there is a reason why it was released after The Davinci Code both in book and film format (and yes, i know Angels and Demons was technically released in book-form before "Davinci" but nobody bought it.) It was because Dan Brown was already known and any film that had his name on it was going to bring in an audience and therefore money.
From the officialSony Pictures channel
This movie is trash. It is implausible or even ridiculous at times and in the end anyone who is familiar with The DaVinci Code will quickly realize that it is the same story, but faster and involves more Catholicism.
Basically, I hated this movie and am angry that it was ever made... haha. This film is terrible and I can't imagine anyone thinking otherwise. The level of incompetence show by police is on James Bond levels and the puzzles what Robert (again, Tom Hanks) is faced with beg the question "why do they bother giving the good guys clues in the first place?"
Once the 2000's are done, it really wouldn't surprise me if this movie was on some sort of list of "abyssal films of the early 21st century."
Basically, watch anything other than this.
My overall rating?
Rocks are exceptionally easy to pick up underwater... sheesh!