A Book A Week

"Hope not ever to see Heaven. I have come to lead you to the other shore; into eternal darkness; into fire and into ice."
- Dante Alighieri, Inferno

Inferno begins with a jolt. Professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) finds himself in a hospital bed with severe head trauma and all of the side effects that accompany it. As Langdon suffers through the sensitivity to light and loud noises, director Ron Howard presents the scenario with fast cuts and sudden volume surges. We become immersed in the moment, feeling every bit as disoriented as Langdon feels. As he struggles to regain his focus, Langdon's thoughts are interspersed with dreamlike visions of humans suffering from horrible afflictions and the outline of a mysterious woman who is covered by a flowing veil.

Langdon barely has time to realize that he is in Florence, Italy before the police arrive. Rather than asking questions, they begin to shoot at him. Thankfully his doctor (Felicity Jones) rescues him and gives him refuge at her apartment. As the events from the previous hours begin to come into focus for Langdon, so do the strange visions he's been having. With various parties using extreme measures to stop him from discovering answers to questions that he's not exactly sure of, Langdon must rely on his intellect and the kindness of a woman he just met to save himself and potentially the entire world.

In this third film adaptation of Dan Brown's bestselling Robert Langdon series, Ron Howard and company rely on many of the same techniques that made the previous films a success. It is impossible not to get sucked into the fast paced mystery, even when the plot becomes far from believable. Like the previous installments, Inferno combines history with an engaging thriller that kept me entertained from beginning to end. This time, the history involves the story of Dante's vision of Hell. For a subject that seems to be so spiritual, this movie comments far less on religion than the other ones did. As always, Tom Hanks shines in his role and Felicity Jones plays a character who holds her own as an equal to Hanks. The ending of the film differs slightly from the novel, but I wasn't as bothered by that as much as I have been by changes in other adaptations. The shortest film in the series, Inferno is a tightly paced, sometimes silly, but thoroughly enjoyable film.