Actor-turned-director Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon) reunites with his Da Vinci Code star Tom Hanks for their second film adaptation of a Dan Brown bestseller. In Angels & Demons, symbologist Robert Langdon must foil a terrorist plot against the Roman Catholic church, while dredging up long-lost secrets the Vatican would prefer to keep hidden.
The film is an entertaining little thriller, but history buffs will want to suspend their disbelief in a big, bad, ugly way if they want to get through this flick without hurling something at the screen.
Ron Howard Directs Angels & Demons, Starring Tom Hanks, Ayelet Zurer, Ewan McGregor
Despite being persona non grata with the Catholic Church over that Da Vinci Code thing, the Vatican asks Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (Hanks) to help them solve a mystery. It appears the sinister Illuminati have returned just as the previous Pope died, kidnapping the 4 cardinals most likely to succeed him plus snatching a jar of anti-matter from a Swiss particle accelerator.
The terrorists plan to slaughter the 4 cardinals after branding them with the symbols for Air, Earth, Fire and Water and cap it all off by using the anti-matter to blow up the entire Vatican City. Assisted by the former Pope's Camerlengo, Fr. Patrick McKenna (Ewan McGregor), and a beautiful scientist (Ayelet Zurer), Langdon must use his symbol-decoding skills to discover the hidden chapels of the Illuminati, using former Illuminatus Giovanni Bernini's sculptures as a guide, in a race against time.
You got all that?
Say what you will about Brown's original novel – author Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses) once said Brown's writing was "so bad it made bad look good" – writers David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman have turned it into a taut little thriller. The tension never lets up as Langdon and his allies chase an elusive enemy through the streets of the Vatican City, while wondering just who is really on their side.
Dan Brown's Angels & Demons: Historical Inaccuracies
Unfortunately the flick plays fast and loose with history. The real Illuminati was a rationalist organization founded in 1776 by Bavarian philosopher Adam Weishaupt. Although at one point, they claimed nearly 2,000 members (including poet Johann Goethe), the Illuminati collapsed when Bavarian Elector Karl Theodor banned all secret societies in 1784.
Weishaupt went into an increasingly impotent exile and, although he advocated the destruction of the church and aristocracy, it's clear he didn't worry those institutions greatly: he died in 1830 at the age of 82.
While we're at it, Bernini was unlikely to have been a member of the Illuminati, since the famous sculptor died in 1680, 94 years before the organization was founded.
The fact that the Illuminati had zero influence on European politics hasn't stopped conspiracy theorists like David Icke (the British Royal Family are alien lizards!) or fundamentalist cartoonist Jack Chick from using the Illuminati as a shadow organization influencing everything evil in the world. Discredited occult "expert" Mike Warnke even claimed, in his 1973 book The Satan Seller, that the Illuminati was the inner organization within the Satanic Church.
The Final Analysis
If you look at Angels & Demons purely as a thriller, it does the job. It's well-paced with some decent thrills, chills and twists and there aren't any dead spots. Keep in mind, however, that it is a complete fiction that has little basis in historical fact. It's a fiction, and not a very plausible one.
It gets a 5/10.
Dominic von Riedemann - Dominic is the Animated Film Feature Writer, and winner of 11 Suite 101 Editors' Choice Awards.
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