Directed by: Ron Howard
Written by: David Koepp, Dan Brown
Cast: Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Omar Sy
I always enjoy the movies based on Dan Brown’s books about Robert Langdon and his adventures. They are fast-paced and continuously interesting. Inferno focuses on Sandro Botticelli’s “Map of Hell,” which is based on Dante’s “Inferno.” Since I’ve never studied either, I learned a lot about both from Inferno.
Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster) is a billionaire geneticist who is convinced that, without proper population control, the human race will become extinct. He enlists the help of a mysterious group called “The Consortium” to help him secretly develop a plague which he believes will take care of the issue. He also creates a creepy video showing a hidden underwater location with a plastic bag containing the plague floating in the water with a message to release the video on a certain day. After he finishes his preparations, Zobrist commits suicide by jumping to his death in Florence.
Meanwhile, Robert Langdon (Hanks) wakes up in a hospital room. He has no idea where he is and no memory of the past few days except for random visions that make no sense to him. Then he realizes he is in Italy. Why is he in Italy? How did he get there? To make things worse, he is being chased by an assassin with a gun, Vayentha (Ana Ularu) and he has no idea why. With the help of his doctor, Sienna Brooks (Jones), he escapes from Vayentha and starts to piece together what he is involved in.
Once in the safety of Sienna’s apartment, Langdon discovers he has an odd little cylinder with a bio-hazard sign in his jacket. After realizing it’s not a tube of a deadly virus, they discover that it’s actually a projector that displays Botticelli’s “Map of Hell” on the wall. Once he gets a good look, he realizes that the painting has been altered. There are secret code messages within the painting.
The secret messages lead them on a hunt throughout Florence, then to Venice, and finally to Istanbul in an attempt to stop Zobrist’s deadly virus from being released into the world. While Langdon and Sienna are on their mission, they continue to be pursued by foreign authorities and members of the World Health Organization, who believe there are better ways to solve the problem of the world’s imminent overpopulation.
Having just finished reading Inferno, the story was fresh in my mind. So I was immediately able to point out differences and similarities between the two. First, the ending was completely different. Personally I preferred the ending of the book much better than the ending of the movie. However, I can see why it was changed as it allowed for a more dramatic end to the story. Second, it irks me when certain details that are mentioned on practically every other page in the book are not included in the movie. When the author mentions someone’s silver curly hair a thousand times, you expect to see that character with silver curly hair in the movie. Nope.
There was also less character development, but it was a two hour movie based on an over 400 page book, so that was to be expected. Overall, the places and events were the same as the book, with mostly minor changes.
