Saturday, October 29, 2016

Movie Review: Inferno

The premise of this movie is about the important subject of overpopulation and the alarming population growth of the world which has almost doubled since 1970 from 4 billion to now almost 8 billion people. It is obvious that organizations like "The World Heath Organization (WHO)" are working on the world overpopulation problem and WHO is an integral part of the many chase scenes in this movie. Involving the World Health Organization in this movie makes sense because the movie is about solving a series of puzzles that are all about trying to stop some insane scientist from creating a worldwide pandemic that will wipe out half the planet and very quickly fix the population explosion problem which according to this scientist will result in the extinction of all humanity. Fundamentally, is a good idea for a movie. What is a stupid idea for a movie is turning a good idea into a bad idea by complicating it with a ridiculous plot which makes almost no sense, and embedding complex and inane "mystery clues" into paintings and statues that are mostly inside museums all around the world.

There are a whole series of reasons why this movie is stupid and badly made. First of all, why would a mad scientist who is plotting to kill half the planet by creating some disease, hide very complex and ridiculous clues within paintings and other works of art, all around the world? The connections between each of these clues that lead Robert Langdon played by Tom Hanks make almost no sense at all, and how each conclusion and connection is reached by Langdon and his partner in this mystery, Sienna Brooks played by Felicity Jones during the fast-talking conversations they have are completely absurd. Why did this mad scientist commit suicide by jumping off a building at the beginning of this bad movie? This is never explained. Why would some insane evil scientist like this have thousands of followers when they know that by trying to kill billions of people they would also probably have to die as well. Why is this pandemic disease only going to kill half of the world's population? Will some kind of cure be introduced at some point to prevent everyone in the world from dying, because what is the point of trying to save the world from itself if at the end of this process everybody is dead anyway? This obvious and very important point is also never addressed in this film.

I am very surprised that Ron Howard, who is one of the best directors in the world, would decide to make this 3rd and hopefully very last film in this trilogy of books written by Dan Brown. I also hated the previous 2 movies in this series, "Angels and Demons" that came out in 2009 and "The Davinci Code", that came out in 2006. Name recognition and the popularity of these books are the reasons why these movies were made, but these books clearly do not translate very well into good or even average movies. Every one of these films is mostly the same story. Solving mysteries, traveling around the world and people chasing people in different parts of the world while they try to solve these mysteries. There is nothing wrong with complex riddles that have to be solved within a story; but have these riddles make some sort of common sense and not be so completely off the wall. Make the connections between the complex dots of the plot make sense and have some kind of an understandable flow to them. Have conclusions drawn that make some sort of common sense that can be understood by the audience. Don't leave the audience hanging and wondering about something before you jump to another scene that seems to have no connection to a previous scene or plot line. Even the big surprise twist at the end of this movie was also ridiculous and really made no sense given all that had happened previously.

I surprised myself at how much I disliked this very bad movie, which should be missed by everyone, especially fans of the 3 Dan Brown books. If you like the books, then stick with them, as they have to be better than all 3 of these very bad movies.

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