20 October 2016
Inferno
A film by Tom Howard
Reviewed by Adam McCormack
How many books has Dan Brown written featuring symbologist Robert Langdon? The answer is either four or one depending on your point of view. Cynics would suggest that he has written just the one and then repeated the same series of dramas with different settings for each new book. The lading lady (love interest is pushing it) changes her name but not her demeanour, for each novel, and while the motivations for the villain may change, his/her evangelical fervour is constant. Formulaic then, but a formula that has made Mr Brown a very wealthy man. The question is why would any rational individual, who values his time, bother reading more than one book or watching more than one film adaptation? Well, you will be relieved to know that there are actually some good reasons for at least watching another film, particularly this one.
Firstly, if you have not read the book it saves you having to cope with Brown’s prose style, which really isn’t for everyone, and (far more than the previous book, The Lost Symbol) the story of Inferno actually has an interesting premise. Billionaire Bertrand Zobrist is concerned that the human race is on the fast track to oblivion, with extreme population growth about to create a fight for resource that will be our universal undoing. His solution is to release a virus that will kill half of the population in short order, a move that will guarantee the survival of the rest. There is a certain irony here, given that real life billionaires Mark and Priscilla Zuckerberg have recently announced an attempt to do the reverse, by investing in scientific research that has the objective of wiping out disease – potentially making the villain of Inferno’s apocalyptic scenario an even sooner reality. Brown’s book was sadly written before the Zuckerberg’s pledge.
Our hero, Langdon (as ever played with consummate talent by Tom Hanks) is drawn into racing to discover where the virus is going to be released, by his former love, Elizabeth Sinskey, played by Sidse Babett Knudsen (most recently seen in Borgen and Westworld), to save the world. As with The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, this involves Langdon having to crack codes and solve clues in famous historical sights around Europe, and this is where the film is at its most compelling – not because there is any great finesse in the riddles (although the Dante references are clever), but because the parts of Florence, Venice and Istanbul that we are taken to quickly become the real stars of the production. Tom Howard manages to give us a film that is well paced, and as credible as the subject matter could ever be, but at the end of it we are left wanting to book city breaks to those destinations, rather than seeking out the next Dan Brown novel.
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