Angels and Demons
7 out of 10
Very good. Not excellent, but overall, a well done movie. Enough suspense to keep everyone in the sold-out show dead silent and unmoving - no one left for the bathroom or popcorn - and a friend of mine who had already read the book and knew what was going to happen, biting her nails and riveted the entire 2.5 hours of the movie. The production quality was amazing, you couldn't tell you weren't actually in the Vatican. It stuck fairly close to the book - some of the bad parts of the book were thankfully left out. (see below for some of them)
Acting was well done by professional international cast, some of the actors however, didn't have much to work with, their parts however pivotal, were smaller than expected. The weakest character was the woman. Not that she wasn't convincing, but that there wasn't much to her. The whole movie/book could have been done without her. This is Landon's chase.
SPOILER!!! SPOILER!!! SPOILER!!
In the book, the characters were driven by fanaticism of all kinds. In the movie, this fanaticism was toned down, one character was money-driven, another driven by political power, religion seemingly a lesser concern for them when in the book, it was the main impetus for their actions.
The movie does not delve into motivations as deeply as it should have. The book's characters were driven by deep feelings which made you empathize with them, both the good and bad characters, but the movie made their motivations more 'secular' you could say and less emotional which I feel is a great loss. Another character does not have the public death that was so important to the whole point of the book.
They did leave out some lame parts of the book - the whole woman-running-around-the-Vatican-in-tight-t-shirt-and- bicycle-shorts thing, the soap-opera-y immaculate conception thing (though they could have done more with the father/son thing than they did), the helicopter fall and the romance.