Angels and Demons theme week
It was a busy week of movies for me and Sheema the last two weeks in May. So much good stuff coming out. I passed on Wolverine, but I had to go see Terminator Salvation and anything by Pixar is a must see…
But Sheema and I really went all out for Tom Hanks and Ron Howard’s reprisal of Robert Langdon in Angels and Demons. We read the book, watched the movie and then went to a lecture at Carleton University on the science behind the plot.
First a confession. I “read” the audiobook. I view listening to an unabridged audiobook and reading the text as the same so this is a very lame confession. I know the story just as well as anyone who used their eyes instead of their ears, but some people don’t see them as equivalent. To people like that I can only say a fond fuck you.
Dan Brown knows how to plot a book, this much is for sure. Angels and Demons had that, (how can I say it?) page-turning quality. Unfortunately Dan is also a very pedantic writer and he styles sentences in a way that makes your skin crawl. And not in a good way. This is the third Dan Brown book that I have read, the others being “Deception Point” and “The Da Vinci Code.” Deception Point doesn’t star Robert Langdon as a character, but there is still a lot in common between the three books. The thriller aspect of trying to put an obscure puzzle together against a life-and-death time constraint is similar.
There is even more in common between Angels and Demons and the Da Vinci Code. Both books begin with a desecrated corpse. A feature that Ron Howard wisely changed in the adaptation.
Dan likes to write about the process of thinking which makes his books very difficult to film. Two hours of people talking and thinking is not very good cinema. Dan also packs his books with useless information that shows that he ‘did the research.’ While it gives his writing an air of authority, (something it sure can’t get from his phrasing) this is another aspect of his work that doesn’t work well with film. The research is there in the mise-en-scene but no one but the film critic is going to see that.
Any one who thinks that the book is better than the movie hasn’t read the book in a long time. Ron Howard did as best he could with the adaptation. There are many parts of the novel that are downright preposterous. For example Langdon falls from a mile and a half high and then lands in a river and ends up with only mild injuries. This is beyond impossible. Langdon fights a trained assassin THREE times by himself. This is ridiculous, and lets not even mention how he faked drowning in one scenario. Howard wisely deleted these non-essential and stupid plot points.
My conclusion is that the book is silly but enjoyable. Don’t expect more than a pot-boiler type of thriller. In MHO the movie was a step up from the novel and gave us Tom Hanks to boot. (It also had much better one-liners) But what really made it an Angels and Demons theme week was the lecture Sheema and I attended at Carleton University on the science behind the film. Carleton has people who work on the CERN massive particle accelerator which was a main feature of the story.
Turns out anti-matter is real. However it would take about a billion years for them to make enough of the stuff to blow up the Vatican. So contrary to Dan Brown, it’s not going to be a practical energy solution anytime soon. The God particle, a casual throw-in in Brown’s story, a.k.a. the Higgs Boson, is also real, at least theoretically. No one has seen it yet, and that’s what they are trying to find at the CERN collider. It’ll be world news if they do find it. If they don’t find it, physics will have to come up with a new model of the universe apparently.
All in all a lot of fun and learning was had in our theme week.
In closing, read the book only as a way to judge Howard’s adaptation, other than that you are wasting your time. And see the movie on DVD, you don’t have to see it in the theater… It’s good, but not earth shatteringly good.
(curious side note: This blog entry just happens to have an id of 503, which happens to be a big clue in Angels and Demons, and is also the title of this outstanding score by Hans Zimmer. Coincidence?)