Saturday, May 23, 2009

Angels and Demons - movie review

Last night I wandered into a showing of Angels and Demons, not expecting much. I was not disappointed.

Good points:
  • Large Hadron Collider - you sexy beast!
  • some cool CGI
  • Ayelet Zurer as strong woman scientist
  • Rome

Bad points

  • Science and Religion as non-overlapping magisteria
  • Ayelet Zurer demoted to female sidekick of Tom Hanks
  • Idiotic plot

I do like the combination of Illuminati and antimatter. The problem is that the whole film is built on the bait-and-switch. Don't filmakers as practiced as Ron Howard know that audiences hate this? This is an entirely separate point from a final plot twist. This is the kind of audience trickery of "and it was all a dream" variety. No excuse that Dan Brown makes the same mistake in his novel. The same mistake is not made in Da Vinci Code.

Oh, yes, and the physicist turns out to be a toxicology expert also, how convenient. And that car bomb? Completely obvious. And who set it BTW? It seems you've just traded one conspirator for another.

The film almost acheives the quality of a Woody Allen film about New York, where the city becomes a character. If only they had gone that direction!

If you follow the evo-creo wars, the editorializing on the proper relations of science and religion will all be sadly familiar. Yawn.

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