No, in response to people such as Anna and Sandi; I haven’t read the book. I didn’t even know there was one, in-fact I hadn’t even heard of the film and had no idea what I was going in to watch, and I prefer it like this, I always find trailers give too much of the film away, let alone books.
I didn’t even know that the term “Angels and Demons” was meant to be metaphorical. I was half expecting the opening scene at CERN to show the opening of some portal that brings Hades himself to single handedly slaughter the world.
What actually happens is this: Some dirty scouser from the Illuminati manages to steal some explosive anti-matter and uses it as a bomb against the Vatican. In the meantime, the four favourite cardinals to become the next pope are taken hostage. Tom Hanks is called in to solve century old riddles to rescue the cardinals and retrieve the explosive.
It did seem a little unnecessary for him to point out Christianity’s flaws at every opportunity, and then go on to explain them. Everyone knows why Christmas is celebrated on December 25th, I don’t need to be reminded. This is a film, not a history lesson. The film did however, always manage to justify these flaws, not just for Christianity but religion in general. This leaves just two beefs:
- Why not just use a normal bomb? Why did they have to bring the element of sci-fi in with this explosive created from an experiment at CERN? I’m quite sure A-Level physics taught me that anti-matter bomb just wouldn’t work, the amount of energy radiated by annihilation (collision between matter and anti matter) is no where near as much as the energy required to make anti-matter in the first place. I’m always the last person to point out scientific flaws in films, and I never dis-recommend a film because of it, it just bugs me that they brought this in when a stick of dynamite would have fitted just as well in the storyline, making the climate of the discussion of science vs religion totally plausible.
- So it turns out the goodest of good guys (I’m really sorry to spoil this for whoever hasn’t seen the film yet, but it seems an old cliche which I personally always anticipate in every film I see anyway, and it always annoys me when I’m right) is actually the villain, and he planned the whole thing for his own glory. Sorry, there are so many elements that could not be planned. The main thing being the timing. With the bombs timer being so ambiguous, as it used a battery with an “approximate” lifetime and was affected by the temperature of its surroundings, he still managed to time the conclusion of his master-plan so perfectly by heroically taking the device in a helicopter and letting it detonate high up away from everyone. Again, they could have done away with this whole conspiracy, the film would have still achieved its same goals, while making more sense at the same time.
Overall I’d still recommend it. As an action film, the perfect balance is achieved, where there’s not so much going on that your eyes dart around the screen struggling to take it all in, and at the same time, there’s enough to keep the film moving at a good pace. As a philosophical film, it does well to openly study the debate between science and religion. As a romance film, there’s nothing tongue-in-cheek about it… See what I did there?