Review: Angels & Demons Brings Religion And Science Crashing Together
- Aug 17, 2018
- 2 min read
Tom Hanks and Ron Howard reunite to tackle another Dan Brown religious thriller, this time driving straight to the heart of Catholicism, the Vatican itself.
The pope is dead, and his end has come seemingly without cause. The cardinals, following their centuries old traditions, seal themselves away to decide who will next take that most holy position. At the same time a vial of highly explosive anti-matter is stolen from CERN and four of the top cardinals vanish. A video message, involving both the cardinals, the anti-matter and the ancient society known as the Illuminati, is delivered to the Vatican police. In turn they seek out Robert Langdon (Hanks) to decode the message before the battery maintaining the stability of the anti-matter fails, and the new world violently collides with the old.
While I enjoyed The Da Vinci Code, it does have a number of flaws. For one, it’s not exactly the fastest moving film, and two, the stakes of the plot, while interesting, aren’t exactly high for the world at large, or even a large number of people. Angels And Demons moves to change that. This time around the film has a built in timer, so things aren’t allowed to slow down in any real manner, and the anti-matter bomb will end the lives of not only those living in the Vatican and Rome, but the thousands of pilgrims gathered for the papal conclave. It doesn’t hurt that the true villain is kept a mystery throughout the film for the vast majority of its runtime.
When a movie lists Tom Hanks as its lead, the assumption that he will deliver is pretty safe, and this is no exception. This iteration of Langdon is just as excited as he was last time around, though the added pressure of the Catholic church being aware of his actions from the prior film help to make his actions more measured and deliberate. Ewan McGregor also makes a large appearance as Langdon’s direct connection between his world and the religious, portraying a character with far more depth than it first seems.
Angels & Demons is The Da Vinci Code but tighter, meaner, and all around better. Hans Zimmer’s score moves things along and the plot is weaved far more neatly, to the point that it genuinely keeps you guessing. All in all, Howard and Hank’s second time around is a thrilling one, regardless of that which you hold sacred.
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