DIRECTOR: Ron Howard LEAD CAST: Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Irrfan Khan, Ben Foster, Sidse Babett Knudsen SCREENWRITER:
David Koepp PRODUCER: Brian
Grazer, Ron Howard EDITOR: Tom
Elkins, Daniel P. Hanley MUSICAL DIRECTOR: Hans
Zimmer
GENRE: Mystery and Suspense CINEMATOGRAPHER:
Salvatore
Totino DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures LOCATION: Turkey
(Istanbul); Italy (Florence, Tuscany, Venice, Veneto); Hungary (Budapest) RUNNING TIME: 122 minutes
Technical assessment: 3.5
Moral assessment: 2.5
CINEMA rating:
V14
MTRCB rating:
PG
Geneticist billionaire
Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster) in his well-attended lectures blames the evils in
the world to overpopulation. Subscribing
to the idea that the Black Plague that thinned out the world’s population
eventually opened the way to the Renaissance, he creates a poison-bomb that
will kill half the world’s population in order to save the other half. Instead of detonating it to release the virus,
Zobrist hides the virus, embeds a trail of clues in Sandro Boticelli’s painting
of La Mappa dell’inferno, then kills
himself. The bomb’s location is what symbologist
Dr. Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) and Dr.
Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones) are out to find despite threats to life and limb
from other entities in pursuit of the bomb.
Just who the bad guys are, you’ll know towards the end.
Based
on Dan Brown’s novel “Inferno”, the movie does not purport to be a faithful copy of the book. It’s the third of Brown’s Robert Langdon
series (Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons), and because the
novelty is wearing off, a fourth just might strike viewers as an Easter egg
hunt for adults. This is not to say
there’s nothing interesting in Inferno. Actors did their parts well, notably Khan;
Hanks is true to character and arouses sympathy, while the women are convincing
in their toughie roles. Production design is excellent; lighting, sound and
music enhance the emotional quality of the scenes; good editing pulls the movie
into a coherent whole. It’s obvious that
Brown has a penchant for puzzles but screenwriter David Koepp and director Ron
Howard must have deemed it smarter to give Inferno
their own twist by liberally changing some vital elements in the story. Also, they may have avoided offending a chunk
of the market by totally cutting off the book’s reference to Manila as “the
gates of hell.”
Inferno
is another good-vs-evil movie that shows how good
humans can be at being bad. The theory that
over-population is the sole cause of human misery is championed by a scientist
with questionable ethics. (In real life,
scientists with questionable ethics are joined by misguided legislators who
push a misleading “reproductive health” agenda on behalf of big pharmaceutical companies.
It’s complicated.) In this movie, the
issue becomes almost simplistic: there is an extended confrontation between two
lead characters wherein one says that saving the lives of some cannot be
justified by extinguishing the lives of many.
That might pass for being Inferno’s
statement but it leaves to older viewers the responsibility of explaining it to
younger ones. Not such an odious job,
considering that watching Inferno
means a trip pass to the interiors of museums and churches in the gorgeous cities
of Venice, Florence, and Budapest.
