Angels & Demons
Jun. 5th, 2009 03:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficIt's pretty lousy. And it spends a lot of time ass-covering and carefully stepping around anywhere there might be toes and saying science and religion should wear friendship bracelets and whatnot... it just makes you want to shout "Get on with it!" The plot is about saving four Pope candidates before they can be ritualistically murdered by a professional assassin, and the only way to find them is to follow the clues of the Illuminati. Which makes me hope that assassin was getting paid well. "Wait, you want me to fill this guy with dirt and then dump him at a secret Illuminati meeting place? Usually I just shoot people with a rifle. You're lucky we're cousins!"
Of course, after a long time hinting at the assassin's quirks and showing how badass he is, so you can wonder "Man, how is Langdon going to take him out?", he finally corners Langdon and says "I'm not going to kill you, I'm not being paid to." Then he literally just walks out. And gets taken out by a trap that anyone who's watched a movie before should've seen coming, let alone a professional hitman. (And how does a priest know how to wire a car to explode anyway? And how to hire a highly-trained assassin? I guess Vatican II really did change the church.)
So our hero is never in any danger and spends most of the movie being led by the nose. The most heroic thing he does is show a surveillance video to the cops. Some other stupidities...
*Langdon and a Vatican cop are locked in an airtight glass room. The cop loads up a cart with books, rams the wall... can't get out. He collapses. Langdon tips this bookshelf over onto the wall... can't get out. Okay, what's the ingenious thing he's going to come up with that will save them when the battering ram and the bookshelf failed? Why, he grabs the cop's gun and shoots out the wall, of course. Isn't that LITERALLY the first thing you would think to do if you were trapped in a glass room with a gun? Remember, this film was made by multiple Academy award winners.
*The Illuminati go to a great deal of trouble to steal some antimatter so they can blow up Vatican City in a really bright explosion, as per an ancient Illuminati curse that the Vatican would be consumed by light. I guess TNT wouldn't do, because it's so dark and non-bright.
*The bad guys are thoughtful enough to give the good guys a live-feed of the bomb counting down. Someone says "hey, it's lit by artificial light, let's turn off the power and see if the bomb goes dark, then we can find it." So they start doing it... one section at a time. I'm no math whiz, but wouldn't it be faster to turn off the power in one half of the city, then the other; then in the half the bomb's in, turn off one half, then the other, and so on and so forth? I know it's only a plot device to atmospherically darken the sets whenever Langdon and co are on the scene, but still, given how Langdon is shown as such a genius that the Vatican flies him all the way from Harvard just for his help, you'd think he'd know basic math.
*The heroine is this scientist who wants to recover the antimatter before it goes nuclear, which it will do if the battery isn't changed in its containment tube (you know the kind, little glass walls so the antimatter doesn't get lonely). So the only reason she goes along on this super-dangerous mission is so she can change the batteries. Can't she just tell a cop how to do it?
*The heroine also knows the symptoms of the exact kind of poisoning used to kill the Pope. Impressive, considering she's a physicist. What other totally random skills does she possess? "No, John, those aren't rabbit bones, those are deformed ferret bones, you can tell by the curvature."
*If you're going to expose someone as an Illuminati, and then he says "He's the Illuminati!", do you say "No, I'm not, it's you and I have proof!" or do you try to kill him so that the armed policemen present have no choice but to shoot you?
*Likewise, it's a good thing for the villain that the police arrived when they did. A minute later and the good guy would've been like "Okay, that's nice, you've branded yourself, now I'm taking you in." And after making a point of how unlikely it was that the heroes would get there just in the nick of time...
*I really hate it when movies make there be a red herring by having someone act like a tremendous dick for no reason, then when it turns out someone else is the bad guy, the world's biggest douche is suddenly a nice guy and everyone's all buddy-buddy.
*If someone is willing to kill the Pope because he believes the Large Hadron Collider is an affront to God, you probably shouldn't give him a speech about how science and religion get along.
Of course, after a long time hinting at the assassin's quirks and showing how badass he is, so you can wonder "Man, how is Langdon going to take him out?", he finally corners Langdon and says "I'm not going to kill you, I'm not being paid to." Then he literally just walks out. And gets taken out by a trap that anyone who's watched a movie before should've seen coming, let alone a professional hitman. (And how does a priest know how to wire a car to explode anyway? And how to hire a highly-trained assassin? I guess Vatican II really did change the church.)
So our hero is never in any danger and spends most of the movie being led by the nose. The most heroic thing he does is show a surveillance video to the cops. Some other stupidities...
*Langdon and a Vatican cop are locked in an airtight glass room. The cop loads up a cart with books, rams the wall... can't get out. He collapses. Langdon tips this bookshelf over onto the wall... can't get out. Okay, what's the ingenious thing he's going to come up with that will save them when the battering ram and the bookshelf failed? Why, he grabs the cop's gun and shoots out the wall, of course. Isn't that LITERALLY the first thing you would think to do if you were trapped in a glass room with a gun? Remember, this film was made by multiple Academy award winners.
*The Illuminati go to a great deal of trouble to steal some antimatter so they can blow up Vatican City in a really bright explosion, as per an ancient Illuminati curse that the Vatican would be consumed by light. I guess TNT wouldn't do, because it's so dark and non-bright.
*The bad guys are thoughtful enough to give the good guys a live-feed of the bomb counting down. Someone says "hey, it's lit by artificial light, let's turn off the power and see if the bomb goes dark, then we can find it." So they start doing it... one section at a time. I'm no math whiz, but wouldn't it be faster to turn off the power in one half of the city, then the other; then in the half the bomb's in, turn off one half, then the other, and so on and so forth? I know it's only a plot device to atmospherically darken the sets whenever Langdon and co are on the scene, but still, given how Langdon is shown as such a genius that the Vatican flies him all the way from Harvard just for his help, you'd think he'd know basic math.
*The heroine is this scientist who wants to recover the antimatter before it goes nuclear, which it will do if the battery isn't changed in its containment tube (you know the kind, little glass walls so the antimatter doesn't get lonely). So the only reason she goes along on this super-dangerous mission is so she can change the batteries. Can't she just tell a cop how to do it?
*The heroine also knows the symptoms of the exact kind of poisoning used to kill the Pope. Impressive, considering she's a physicist. What other totally random skills does she possess? "No, John, those aren't rabbit bones, those are deformed ferret bones, you can tell by the curvature."
*If you're going to expose someone as an Illuminati, and then he says "He's the Illuminati!", do you say "No, I'm not, it's you and I have proof!" or do you try to kill him so that the armed policemen present have no choice but to shoot you?
*Likewise, it's a good thing for the villain that the police arrived when they did. A minute later and the good guy would've been like "Okay, that's nice, you've branded yourself, now I'm taking you in." And after making a point of how unlikely it was that the heroes would get there just in the nick of time...
*I really hate it when movies make there be a red herring by having someone act like a tremendous dick for no reason, then when it turns out someone else is the bad guy, the world's biggest douche is suddenly a nice guy and everyone's all buddy-buddy.
*If someone is willing to kill the Pope because he believes the Large Hadron Collider is an affront to God, you probably shouldn't give him a speech about how science and religion get along.
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Date: 2009-06-05 09:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-05 09:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-06 05:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-05 09:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-06 03:24 am (UTC)You're good at those lateral thinking puzzles, aren't ya?
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Date: 2009-06-06 10:33 am (UTC)