Angels & Demons (The Movie)

I went to go see Angels & Demons this past weekend with my boyfriend. I actually gave him the book first to read, which he did, and loved! I was very excited when I heard about Angels & Demons being turned into a movie, but I was also very skeptical. I had also read The Di Vinci Code before I had gone to see that movie, and I don’t know if I have ever been so disappointed! They really destroyed one of the books that I had truly enjoyed. Since I liked Angels & Demons more than The Di Vinci Code, I was worried, but then again, HOW can you not go see the movie. I think the only book to movie that was actually worse than The Di Vinci Code was I am Legend with Will Smith. That was one of the worst movie I have ever seen, when the book was just SO good. In that movie, well they just destroyed the ending and removed like the ONLY other main character (ok, in the book there were 3, and one was not a little boy). But enough about the horrors of that movie and back to Angels & Demons.
Well, first off, they did keep Tom Hanks playing the main character of Robert Langdon and Ayelet Zurer played Vittoria Vetra and Ewan McGregor plays Camerlengo. I think overall they did a fairly good selection of the characters. I had no complaints about that.



So, in the movie Robert and Vittoria work together to stop the Illuminati, which is a 400 year old secret society of scientists who have sworn revenge on the Catholic Church for torturing them for their beliefs years ago. The Illuminati (as Robert and many professionals think) are believed to have at one time become very powerful even working their way into the Mason organization, government and every place of power, but to have died out about 100 years ago. But once Robert sees Illuminati written on the paper, he begins to become a skeptic. A canister of very volatile antimatter has been stolen from CERN and Vittoria has to find it and replace the battery before it goes out in an explosion destroying blocks of Vatican City. The Main part of the story takes place in Roma, where the Pope has just died and all of the Cardinals from around the world are in Conclave selecting the next Pope. Robert and Vittoria follow the Path of Illumination in an attempt to stop the assassin as he takes out the four preferratti (the Cardinals that are the most likely candidates for becoming the next Pope), branding them each with one of the four elements (earth, fire, wind, water) every hour on the hour until Midnight. The assassin (who was also the one who stole the anti matter from CERN) has hidden the canister within the Vatican and at midnight when the battery dies on the canister protecting the antimatter; it will implode and destroy a HUGE area!! SO that is the jest of the story. I don’t want to say anymore

I was very upset however that you didn’t get to see a lot of CERN. I mean, heck the first 100+ pages of the book take place in this really cool science lab, and you never get to really see it. Yah, you get a few seconds in the beginning of the movie, where they are actually creating the antimatter, but umm…that part isn’t even in the book. ALSO, they completely negated the fact that Father Silvano and Vittoria where the ONLY two that actually knew about the antimatter. There was NO team of 20+ scientists working on this experiment. It was just them. ALSO they also completely neglected to point out the fact that Father Silvano was Vittoria’s adopted father (or maybe I just happened to miss that part) and that he actually meet her in an orphanages when he was a priest there. And another thing, the only real clue you had to the fact that Silvano was a priest was a quick shot of him at the beginning of the movie and he had a black shirt on with the priest white collar in it. It was something that you could have easily overlooked and not realized until MUCH later in the movie, and of course, like so many of us that guessed the ending…that kinda played a key role!

So in the movie, Vittoria is the one who finds her “Father” dead, although in the movie it is just her Partner. NO! The relationship between them was SO much more than that and it went so much deeper than JUST PARTNERS! As many of us know, in the book, it is the head of CERN (Max Kohler) (who I would have loved to see with his cool ass wheel chair and cold domineer); he then harasses Langdon in the middle of the night and faxes him the image of the DEAD scientist with ILLUMINATI branded in to his chest. THAT is what gets Langdon to go to CERN. ALSO I would have loved to see the really cool plane that flies like SUPER FAST!! It was not the Vatican that went and got Langdon…so no it was not “you call me” as Langdon so clearly quotes in the movie. Also Vittoria is out of the country when her Father is discovered; she comes back and tells Max Kohler that she and her father have secretly been working on the antimatter.

I want to vent about the ending so badly, but for those of you who have not seen it I won’t :o)

OK, I guess I am done venting about the off spots of the movie. I don’t want to give much more of it away for those of you who have not both read the book or seen the movie. But I do recommend that you READ THE BOOK (at least first).

But I do recommend going and seeing this movie, but PLEASE read the book first. Books are amazing things and we should all enjoy them. I have just finished my latest book. Zombie Empire, I will have to blog about that as well.

Sadly, I do not have internet connection at home yet since I just moved and I have not been able to blog, so I have about 4 that I need to post!! WTF!