It’s a neat trick, and it anchors the hubbub in all the Langdon stories-except for “Inferno,” in which the conspiracy is cooked up not by Opus Dei, as in “The Da Vinci Code,” or by the Vatican, as in “Angels and Demons,” or by the Freemasons, as in “The Lost Symbol,” but by a theatrical geneticist whose plot to curb Earth’s unsustainable population growth involves a deadly biological weapon in a dissolving plastic bag. Brown typically compensates for clunky prose with his ability to generate a sense that the distant past is fuller, wilder, and more complicated than we knew. If all of this sounds indecipherably complicated, rest assured that when you’re watching the movie it is even more so. An unwieldy crew pursues them, including a helicopter drone, the Italian police, several officials from an unrecognizably glamorous World Health Organization (including Sidse Babett Knudsen, from “Borgen” and “Westworld”), and a dry, villainous, scene-stealing fixer called the Provost, played wonderfully by Irrfan Khan. They're looking for the usual stuff: secret messages, hidden passageways, an object of life-or-death importance. Mark’s Basilica, in Venice and the Hagia Sophia and the Basilica Cistern, in Istanbul. The scavenger hunt that occupies the rest of “Inferno” begins when an armed assassin dressed as an Italian carabiniere comes sprinting down the hospital corridor Langdon and Brooks flee, and subsequently sneak their way through the Boboli Gardens and the Palazzo Vecchio, in Florence St. In the tradition of all of Langdon’s female sidekicks, she is earnest and brilliant and gorgeous, each in rather implausible measure she tends to Langdon while wearing a skirt and wedge heels that she (much like Claire Dearing, Bryce Dallas Howard’s character in “Jurassic World”) will speedily run around in for most of the movie. Some relief enters Langdon’s hospital room in the form of Dr. Inferno is the cure.” The apocalyptic effect is furthered by Langdon’s woozy, sepia-toned visions of bloody rivers and severed appendages, which, like most of the other touchstones in the movie, are soon revealed to be somewhat arbitrary references to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Zobrist, in voice-over, makes a series of disagreeable proclamations: “Mankind is the cancer in its own body,” for instance, and “Humanity is the disease. In the movie, the severity of Langdon’s predicament is underlined by the scene that precedes it, which consists of closeup shots of a geneticist-cum-doomsday prophet named Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster) giving a TED Talk and then committing suicide. He wakes up in a Bourne-type situation, jerking upright in an empty hospital room with a head wound and no idea how he got from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Florence, Italy. I had read “Inferno” when it first came out, but when I picked it up again before seeing the movie I found myself in the grip of amnesia, much like Langdon at the start of the book. Pumpkins, is unable to transform Langdon into a lifelike figure onscreen. Howard has made three of the Langdon books into movies, and all of them star Tom Hanks, who glares at the reader skeptically from the cover of the reissued “Inferno.” It’s a testament to the insipidity of Brown’s character-writing practices that even Hanks, still preternaturally charming in such recent roles as Captain Sully and David S. “Inferno,” the book, is the fourth of Brown’s novels featuring Robert Langdon, a professor of “symbology” (an imaginary discipline) and a general charisma vacuum who solves vast historical conspiracies by declaiming his way through the art and history of Western Europe. “Inferno,” the movie, grossed just fifteen million dollars in its first three days, falling below Tyler Perry’s “Boo! A Madea Halloween,” which was in its second weekend, and earning its place as Howard’s fourth consecutive domestic flop. In September, Anchor Books released a movie-tie-in edition of Dan Brown’s 2013 best-seller “Inferno,” to accompany Ron Howard’s adaptation of the novel, which came out in theatres last weekend.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |