Talkie Tuesday: Inferno

"Cerca trova."

Hello everyone!

Since Sherlock has now finished, and Game of Thrones hasn't begun yet for me to do my weekly blogs with recaps of it, I'm back to reviewing movies, as per usual. 

Now, I do have quite a backlog it would seem, considering the fact that I keep finding other stuff to write about, which sometimes might feel counter-productive, but believe me, with the amount of things I watch just to relax, it's not actually THAT far-fetched I don't think.

Anyway.

I wanted to watch this movie pretty much as soon as it was announced they were filming it, mostly because I have, in fact, enjoyed reading Dan Brown's books with Robert Langdon as the primary character. Also, I've enjoyed watching Tom Hanks on screen, making sure everybody else around him and those watching wonder about what he was talking about half the time.

And while Inferno sounds like something straight out of Hell, it's actually, in my opinion, a tourist guide to Florence.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I did enjoy the movie for the movie's sake. The fact remains the book itself was already one of those postcards you'd think about when thinking Florence or even Istanbul (also, I called the ending. I so called it.).

We begin with a man who's hunted by some folks we don't know, running apparently for his life and giving a voice-over that he would leave steps for someone else to follow, right before he committs suicide from a clock tower.

Like any James Bond movie worth its salt, this has us in the action immediately, and then we move to Robert Langdon, Harvard professor who wakes up in a hospital in Florence and has no idea how he got there or what's been going on. Temporal amnesia, something. Anyway, he keeps having weird visions of a scorched Earth, people dying, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, basically Hell on Earth, really, but he doesn't have time to figure things out since an Italian police woman comes to shoot at him, and he and Dr. Brooks, the woman who'd been treating him, make a run for it.

Langdon finds a "Faraday Pointer" (after showering and feeling more human), which is basically a miniature image projector and with it he sees a reproduction of the Map of Hell, but the levels have sort of been mixed up, letters put in, and the name Zobrist is also on there, Zobrist being a billionaire who'd been preaching that there are too many humans on Earth.

Now, all fine and dandy, but Brooks and Langdon need to run yet again since they're being tailed, once more, this time by their hospital assassin and the World Health Organisation, but luckily Langdon knows the ins and outs of Florence even though he's a walking amnesiac.

With a good encyclopedic head, anyway.

They try retracing the steps he might have taken, which includes figuring out he and a friend of his had stolen the death-mask of Dante, and so Brooks and himself need to find it before anyone finds them.

Which they do, but an agent catches up to them, one we remember from when Zobrist committed suicide at the beginning of the movie (yep, that was him; also, conveniently, he's created a virus called 'Inferno' which will be released into the world to cull its population). Together, they're off to Venice to figure out which Doge brought the Four Horses from St. Mark's square to the city.

Here, Langdon is shocked when Brooks reveals herself as a Zobrist agent (in fact, she and Zobrist had been lovers), and who leaves him behind to head to Hagia Sofia herself.

Istanbul being their next target, natch.

Langdon would have died at the hands of his agent "friend" if not for a timely intervention of a private security firm called 'The Consortium' who had originally helped Zobrist, but by now have figured out they'd been helping a lunatic.

Langdon is reunited with WHO agent Elizabeth (conveniently an old lover of Langdon's), and together they fly off to Istanbul where they figure out it's not the Hagia Sofia but the old water system, the cysterns underground, where the Inferno virus will be released.

What follows is a race against time so the thing stays right where it is, or at least is contained, and they do in fact manage it, even though Brooks detonates two bombs, dying in the process, to try and make it spread.

With the virus contained, the world is once again a safe place, and Langdon can put this episode behind him, after having been injected by a drug that induces memory loss, everything aside from the virus hunt staged, and pretty much bouncing all around Europe to save the world. And he didn't even get the girl in the end! Just his Mickey Mouse watch, plus the satisfaction of returning the Dante death mask before leaving Europe once more.

Whew.

Well, it was a doozy, this one. As an action-thriller movie, it's something you can easily enjoy. It's also something art historians tend to moan about. I kept texting with my sister back and forth, and she was growling at some of the things I mentioned haha!

But there are definite changes from the book - namely, in the character of Sienna Brooks, who in the book repents and tries to help WHO instead of releasing the virus, and the virus itself, which instead of killing people (as per movie) is actually a contraceptive that would render some of the population sterile which would prevent the numbers from growing. 

And oh, yeah, it gets released in the book, as opposed to the HEA in the movie.

I don't know, I mean, I enjoyed this for enjoyment sake, but I think Dan Brown should either retire Professor Langdon now, or give him something ... else. I can't even articulate it.

Tom Hanks was a joy to watch, however, as always, and Felicity Jones was a lovely on-screen presence!

xx

*images and video not mine