film, eyeballs, brain

Me [after drinks and dinner]: What are you up to later? Wanna go see a movie?
She: Sure! What do you want to see?
Me: I’d like to see Star Trek.
She: I’ve already seen it, but I’d see it again. How about Angels and Demons?
Me: If you’ve seen it already, we should see Angels and Demons instead.
She: No, if you really want to see Star Trek, we should see that.
Me: No, I’m fine with Angels and Demons, really.
She: Don’t be passive-aggressive! If you want to see Star Trek, we should watch Star Trek.

[Later that evening, after Angels and Demons:]

She: What did you think?
Me: It wasn’t too bad, I guess.

I guess I can’t seem to shake this passive-aggressiveness, because Angels and Demons was surely the worst movie I’ve seen all year, even more than Saw IV.

At first I was worried of depriving myself of another layer of meaning, because I have not seen Howard’s The Da Vinci Code, nor read anything by Dan Brown (and clearly never will). Was I going to miss little references to the earlier movie? Was the narrative going to turn on the audience’s knowledge of previous events? Turns out my worries were unfounded: the motive force of the plot depends wholly on the audience not knowing anything. Worse, actually: the film also implies that the viewer doesn’t have (or shouldn’t bother) to process the information.

The plot is already deeply convoluted and absurd as it is: it’s based on the (wrongly historical) premise being that Bernini and — [cue Queen chorus here] — Galileo! plot against the Vatican in the name of — [cue Thomas Dolby voice here] — Science! This nefarious scheme is carried out in the present by persons unknown, who have kidnapped the Four Cardinals Voted Most Likely To Become Pope and is keeping the authorities at bay with a ticking jar of lab-brewed antimatter that, I swear, looks like one of those electric storm / plasma lamps available in the dorm room section at Target for $19.95.

But the screenwriters — David Koepp and the Oscar-winning Akiva Goldsman — actually have the gall to presume that the audience wouldn’t be frustrated with the five-second bursts of plot exposition. A good number of said plot expositions are literally done while Tom Hanks is running up stairs or down a hallway, e.g. “The killer chose that particular church because in 1846 Bernini who was actually a member of the Illuminati wrote about the Ecstasy of St. Theresa in his notebooks and St. Theresa symbolizes one of the four elements which in turn symbolize the four kidnapped cardinals!” Whew. Hanks is looking a little doughier here than usual, but clearly the man has enough lung power and symbology-fu to pull it off. It’s the historian equivalent of those Marvel comic fight scenes when entire plot summaries are delivered between a swing and landing a punch.

Of course, narrative exposition isn’t always necessary. Many of the recent action movies coming out of Hollywood recently (see Quantum of Solace, for instance), do little but string one action sequence after another; all that’s needed is for the audience to check their disbelief at the door and take pleasure in the ride. What’s particularly irksome about Angels and Demons, I think, is that it’s deluded itself into thinking that Hanks’ historical detective work is even worth portraying. (I love how he can walk into a library he’s never seen before, pull off the right volume from the shelf, turn to the right page — and ask someone to translate the Italian or Latin for him.)

The whole movie is basically a ridiculous scavenger hunt all across Rome, utilizing the same pattern over and over: a mad dash to a church, look at the statues, figure out which direction an angel statue is pointing, whip out a tourist map and a Sharpie, do a mad dash to another church, and repeat five times, with a couple of side trips to the superduper-secret Vatican Archives. Add two of the more ludicrous movie scenes in recent memory — a Death-by-Library scene which probably worked better in Moonraker, and an ending that’s either Genuine Catholic Miracle or Science So Bogus We Don’t Care If You Notice We’re Totally Making Shit Up  — some of the limpest line readings this side of Revenge of the Sith (granted, Hanks / Skarsgaard / Mueller-Stahl / McGregor aren’t given any good lines anyhow), an epilogue actually set in the Pope’s dressing room, and — yeah, avoid.

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