Thread: Angels & Demons

My daughter and I went to see Night at the Museum II yesterday, but we arrived at the movie theater 10-minutes after showtime thanks to holiday traffic. We decided to see Angels & Demons, which turned out to be quite entertaining...just as long as you can move past the historical, operational, and factual inaccuracies of Catholicism and enjoy the movie for what it is - a suspense thriller.

If you liked The Da Vinci Code, then you'll enjoy this movie since it feels like a sequel. If you loved the book, you probably be disappointed since the plot of the movie differs greatly. Also, if you're a devout Catholic you will probably be offended.

Overall, I give it 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Was the movie consistent with the book?

Originally Posted by riffjim4069

If you loved the book, you probably be disappointed since the plot of the movie differs greatly.

So Im gonna go ahead and say no.... its still on my want to see list... along with drag me to hell.

The review I heard was negative. They said that every few minutes Tom Hanks has to stop and explain everything to the audience and the flow of the movie really suffers. I am Catholic but I liked the Da Vinci code, its pure fiction but entertaining.

I recently saw Angels & Demons too and I must admit that I really liked this one. I have also seen The Da Vinci Code but I am of the opinion that Angels & Demons is a lot better than the "first" part. The movie was very thrilling and I really like that. Besides this I like Tom Hanks as an actor. I hope that there will be another movie.

I saw Angels & Demons a couple of weeks ago, immediately after reading the book. I'm one who takes greatest delight when a movie closely matches its basis book, and in this sense A&D was a disappointment to me, at least I was less satisfied with it than with The Da Vinci Code movie vs. its book.

Sometimes the changes are simply stuff left out or truncated to make a reasonable-length screenplay, and that was for the most part the case with DVC. The theatrical presentation left out or shortened several critical points that rendered it a bit hollow in my opinion. But the extended BD version (close to 3 hrs long) put some of that back in and, again IMHO, was all the better for it. (With the BD one can pause and take breaks, so the length is not an issue like it is in a theater.) The extended-length movie much more closely matched the book at least in terms of the depth of the underlying information like Sophie's bloodline and Teabing's longer explanation of the holy grail as another manifestation of the "sacred feminine" in context with The Last Supper.

With A&D, the movie took departures that are not simply ommissions, tho' they may have been rooted in the necessity of shortening the screenplay. Two of those departures change the story line somewhat, and cannot be reversed in an extended length movie (which I hope will be what is eventually released in BD anyway). In my opinion, one very important part of the book (in which I actually found a personal epiphany!) was the Camerlengo's speech to the cardinals. That was truncated so much in the movie that the message was largely lost, and that also contributed to my disappointment. (That full speech could readily be restored in an extended version; it was not part of the main storyline in the book or movie but did contain a powerful message that this non-Catholic really took to heart.)

That said, A&D was a fairly exciting movie on its own and made an interesting "sequel" to DVC. Fiction to be sure, but it still makes you think "Hmmmm"...just like any well-crafted conspiracy theory should, and Brown is proving to be a master of that! vurbano makes a good observation about the relentless "explanations", but you might be able to ignore that aspect to better enjoy the storyline...

BTW - Welcome to WiSa...!

Originally Posted by WiSa

I recently saw Angels & Demons too and I must admit that I really liked this one. I have also seen The Da Vinci Code but I am of the opinion that Angels & Demons is a lot better than the "first" part. The movie was very thrilling and I really like that. Besides this I like Tom Hanks as an actor. I hope that there will be another movie.

Technically, Angels & Demons is the first part (at least as far as the books go), but it doesn't really matter to the story of either one... and I assume there will be another movie, since The Lost Symbol is coming out this fall - the next book to feature Robert Langdon.

On a sidenote, I actually enjoyed Deception Point more than either of these and think it would make a better movie, although it doesn't feature Langdon.