I can’t remember which one I read first, but I think I read Angels and Demons before I read The DaVinci Code.  I liked them both, but I really thought the former was the superior book.  Sure, DaVinci got all the props because of the controversy… and I think it was also because it told a story that the reader could figure out along with the characters - whereas to unravel A&D, you need an in-depth knowledge of Bernini’s greatest works and the layout of the hundreds of churches of Rome.  But I definitely think that the A&D story was much more active and engaging.  So I made the decision to reread the book before I saw the movie.

Big Mistake.

Obviously there would be adjustments going from page to screen, there always are.  And some of them were so bizarrely inconsequential, I couldn’t figure out why they did it - for example - the Great Elector’s name and nationality were changed from Italian to German.  Why?  No reason I could see.  And the camerlengo (who was still said to have been raised in Italy) was played with an Irish/Scotch dialect.  I’m pretty sure Ewan could have tackled the Italian, why change it?  Still - some of the changes were worthwhile.  The most interesting, I thought, was the treatment of the Hassassin in the movie.  As I read it, I thought to myself over and over - how can they portray this character as written in any socially responsible way in this day and age?  The answer: they couldn’t.  I thought it was a wise decision to change his ethnicity - a Middle Eastern zealout terrorizing the center of the Western church just stirs up a lot of things we don’t need to stir right now.  However, I’m not sure why they had to make him a mercenary instead of a believer.  Perhaps it just would have been too difficult to portray his inner satisfaction, and making him cold and disconnected made him simpler.

One thing that bugged me about the movie in a big way is that they all but deleted Vittoria’s character.  In the book she was part of the action, but in the movie, she felt like she was there merely to acknowledge that the screenwriter had, indeed, read the book and knew that the character existed.  They removed her parental attachment and all personal investment in the events.  She was just a chick trying to fix a battery (random unimportant change to the story) - who, *SPOILER - sorta* in the end, couldn’t.  In the book she was tough and interesting and active - heck she even did some serious violence, but in the movie she was purely a prop - not even a plot device, just a prop.

All the backstory was gone from the characters too.  Vittoria’s father, the Camerlengo’s father - gone.  CERN - almost entirely gone.  Max Kohler - gone.  I can respect the Max Kohler deletion - he is so separate from the rest of the action, it was a logical piece to remove, but he was interesting in the book, and I would have liked to see him brought to life.

The biggest omission, in my opinion, was the role of the media.  In the book, the way things were gobbled up and leaked and commodicized and blown out of proportion by the media was essential to the scope of the story - and especially to the Camerlengo’s storyline.  I missed that angle.  But perhaps Hollywood wasn’t willing to portray the media as "the arm of anarchy."

One thing the movie did very well that I think the book did not was communicating the sense of urgency.  There’s an hour between each murder - which is not a lot of time.  In the book you have pages of thinking and arriving at the answer, but the movie did a great job of portraying the how frantic and brief those windows really were.Oh… and I was super pissed about one particular piece of the plot that was entirely changed.  No one reads this blog, but I’ll put a spoler alert here now just in case some hapless google searcher stumbles across and actually reads this far.  So SPOILER ALERT.

ONE OF THE CARDINALS FRIGGIN’ LIVES.  Are you kidding me?  And a bunch of strangers came together to save him.  Isn’t that sweet?  But it’s completely wrong!  The whole point is that all four of the preferiti are destroyed!  I was really bothered by this.

END SPOILER

So, in all - okay movie based OH SO LOOSELY on a much better book.  Tom Hanks is still hopelessly miscast, but I thought he was better in this one than The DaVinci Code (oh - and this book was written first, so I was really annoyed with the need to reference the events from DaVinci.  Unneccesary.)  In general, though, I would say that the rest of the movie was well cast and I thought Ewan McGregor did a good job with the sketch of a character they allowed to survive from the book.  It was worth seeing, but if you have a choice whether or not to reread the book before you see the movie, do yourself a favor: DON’T.