Angels & Demons

Believe it or not, I was actually looking forward to seeing this movie when I walked into the Tyngsboro AMC early Saturday afternoon. I knew it would be absolutely mindless, but I thought maybe in its mindlessness, it might be fun. Somehow the idea of pure escape appealed to me.

It was tempting to start writing my review in my head in advance, before the trailers even started playing. In many respects, I knew what was coming.

For someone like me who makes a point of investigating and exploring conspiracy theories, Dan Brown is the kind of guy who just makes a mockery of the whole thing. I'd actually read the book upon which Angels & Demons was based, and like The Da Vinci Code, I'd found it to be not only banal, but deleterious to the efforts of those who would attempt to explore the hidden aspects of contemporary politics and history.

In Brown's world, the conspiracies always involve centuries-old organizations that nevertheless still retain their power through some kind of mystical inertia. This belies the essential truth about conspiracies: the organizations themselves are pointless. It is only the individuals that count. Brown, however, always fixates on the organizations. In the world of conspiracy theories, that's a dead give away that you are dealing with the realm of camp, rather than truth.

For example, in The Da Vinci Code, who really gives a crap about what happened two thousand years ago? What does that have to do with today? It is the conspiracies that are alive at this very moment matter, not the ancient ones. Mystical philosophies and pedigrees are pointless. It is raw power that matters.

The second prejudice I held against this movie is that I knew from the book that the physics in it, which plays a major role, is just downright stupid as well, pathetically so.

But like I said, I'd already accounted for much of this before I walked in the theater. I was just hoping for an interesting story. I was willing to grant an indulgence on every other count, if it didn't offend me on the level of narrative.

As a thriller, it mostly worked, and for the first act, I was hooked. It kept up the constantly forward-linked action of its predecessor, and thus it didn't disappoint me.

But after the midpoint, something started to go horribly wrong in a way that began to offend me on a deep level, beyond the complaints I've already mentioned. It happened during a scene in one of the churches in Rome in which there is a wild gun battle during a fire. People get shot right and left, including one of the major sympathetic characters, who winds up dying on the spot.

I thought to myself: wait, that character's not supposed to get killed. I'm not talking about the book, the details of which I've forgotten, but rather the laws of story telling. There was no reason for that character to be killed, and the essential rule of motion picture story telling, drawing upon Aristotle himself, is that what happens is always what needs to happen.

It occurred to me that the reason the character was killed was to eliminate him as a suspect in the mystery part of the story. What an absolutely crummy reason. It is a hallmark of lazy story-telling.

This actually turns out to be the preferred way in which the story eliminates its suspects. It kills them all, until only a few are left.

But worse than this is that the movie rather unexpectedly descended into full-fledged orgiastic illustration of what I calls the Laws of Destruction in Postmodern cinema. Briefly stated, they are:

1. The Law of Book Destruction. If a book appears as a major element in the story, it must partially or completely destroyed during the course of the story.

2. The Law of Library Destruction. If a library appears as a major element in the story, it must be partially or completely destroyed or desecrated during the course of the story.

3. The Law of Museum Destruction. If a museum (including a historic church) appears as a major element of the story, it must be partially or completely destroyed or desecrated as part of the story.

There are actually a few more, but these are the ones that are appropriate here. In the second half of the movie, Angels & Demons not only upholds these laws, but seems to go hogwild with them in a way I haven't seen on film in quite some time.

Let's see...the protagonist is a scholar who desires to gain access to the Vatican archives to study rare manuscripts. The story allows him to do so, and he gets to examine an extremely rare Galileo pamphlet, of which only one example exists.

What do the characters do? Of course theyliterally rip a page right out of the book, because who has time for niceties like the preservation of rare manuscripts. The protagonist scholar then carries the rare page around like a train ticket. All the while I'm obsessed, thinking, "Is he at least going to put that damn thing in a safe place?"

The story makes it clear that if the page is exposed to water, it will instantly dissolve. Later when the hero puts the folded and ripped page in his pocket, all I can think about is the scene I know is coming from the trailer, when he is going to dive into a fountain. I grow agitated. Is Ron Fucking Howard (the director) actually going to have the character destroy that page!?

Not until Hanks' character changed his clothes could I finally relax. But then he returns to that same Vatican Archives, and this time, he winds up ransacking an entire shelf of rare manuscripts, crushing them with a metal bookshelf to save himself.

Fuck you Ron Howard!! What is the fucking point of this? The story could have been told without all this destruction, so why do it?

Because that's what we do now in our culture: we dsstroy, dismantle, and pillage.

Later in the story we get treated to close-ups of melting artwork in a church, and, as a piece-de-resistance, crumbling ceiling artwork inside St. Peter's.

As in every such contemporary instance, the most disturbing aspect of this is how casually this all happens, as if it the most normal thing in the world, to destroy and ransack our cultural heritage in order to resolve whatever plot issue is at hand. The movie excuses this all by the premise that Rome itself will be destroyed if the mystery isn't solved in time, but this feels like a crutch. Don't complain about the Vatican Library, bub. It could have been a lot worse.

Yes, it's only a movie, but why must these things happen in every movie? The near constancy of the Laws of Destruction (sometime I'll write about them in detail) speaks volumes about our societal attitudes towards art and culture. The key is that kind of pointless destruction without remorse has become mandatory in Postmodern cinema.

I'm fucking sick and tired of it. I'm sick and tired of spending twenty minutes distracted by pointless worries over whether or not a character will bother to put a page from a rare manuscript in the glove compartment instead of waving it in the wind. I'm sick and tired of seeing libraries destroyed every time they appear, and having it transpire with some kind of repressed pleasure by the director.

The destruction happened for no reason at all, in story terms, and was simply gratuitous. It didn't have to be that way. A few changes in the script of this story could have made all the difference. But that's not how Hollywood rolls these days.

The key, in my mind, is that even the "good" characters never seem to care, or to make any real effort to avoid such destruction, or to express any remorse at the loss. It always what "must be done." For me, nothing speaks more to the essential barbarism of our time than the way Hollywood movies methodically resort to smashing every artifact and ripping apart every book that appears on screen. It is the most offensive set of cliches in the current Postmodern canon.

Did I mention the stupid conspiracy aspect, which of course turns out to be a conspiracy of only a handful (as all Hollywood conspiracies must turn out to be), or that the physics is over-the-top ridiculous? Oh yes, I guess I did. But I hardly even cared about those things by the end.

I wanted this to be a decent mindless thriller, but this movie felt like a kick in the crotch to all my Classical sensibilities. I couldn't wait for it to be over.