BEFORE: I'm here, I made it to the last film of 2017 - another day late, since our office Christmas party was on Wednesday night, and after a few beers I was in no shape to watch a film when I got home. But I'm still finishing a full 10 days before the end of the year, normally I'd be finished in mid-November, but I did go on vacation, and then "Star Wars" happened, so in the end everything worked out as it should.
Tom Hanks carries over again from "Sully", and my apologies if you were expecting "The Circle" or "The Post", but I don't have access to those films yet. There's a precedence here, since my final film in the year 2010 was "Angels & Demons".
And my linking ends here, I'll start a new chain fresh on January 1, though I have no idea where to start just yet. I've reviewed all of my February romance-related films, and assembled them in the best order I could do - there will have to be one full break in that chain, and I think two indirect linkings, which means after 10 years of linking movies, finally my opportunities are dwindling - still, I'm going to do the best that I can. Then I've linked backwards from February 1 to about mid-January, so there's still some work to do to find the starting point for Year 10. I'll explain this all further in next week's wrap-up post.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Angels & Demons" (Movie #730)
THE PLOT: When Dr. Robert Langdon wakes up in an Italian hospital with amnesia, he teams up with Dr. Sienna Brooks, and together they must race across Europe to foil a deadly global plot.
AFTER: This film is the third film centered around Robert Langdon, but it's based on the fourth book. That's all right, just like the James Bond series it doesn't matter what order they make the movies in, because each story is (more or less) self-contained. Hey, the first book in the series was "Angels & Demons", but they made a movie out of the 2nd book, "The Da Vinci Code" first. But it seems like the series follows some rule about diminishing returns, because the first film was a boffo smash success, the 2nd was somewhat less so, and this film, well, didn't really perform as it should have.
So perhaps there are no future plans to make a film out of "The Lost Symbol" - Wikipedia says they tried to make a screenplay for that, I wonder what went wrong. It's a shame, because if ever there were a time to make a movie about the secret symbols in Washington, D.C. architecture and statues that suggest that there's a secret society running American politics, man, this would be it. That would explain a lot, right?
Anyway, back to "Inferno" - this is yet another film where the story is not told completely linearly, we're thrown sort of into the middle of the story and have to piece together what took place before as it is slowly revealed, but here that design really works, because the main character is recovering from a head wound and has a form of selective amnesia - the far-fetched Hollywood kind that is only temporary, of course. So we're just as confused as Langdon is about what's going on, and we have to figure it all out as he does. So that's a case like "Memento", where starting at the middle of the story really is justified. When this is used in a biopic or for forced dramatic effect, or to cover up a story's shortcomings ("cough - Sully - cough") or make a story conform to six-act structure, that remains unacceptable in my book.
As a result of this amnesia, Langdon does not know whom to trust - which would only be a problem if several parties like the World Health Organization and the Italian police weren't out to apprehend him. He also vaguely remembers getting an injection, but since he doesn't remember the circumstances, it's possible that he himself is a carrier of the virus that he's trying to stop. Again, we'll all find out when he does.
The referenced art here includes a lot of Botticelli, with literary references to Dante's "Inferno", which happens to share its name with the virus. But unlike the secrets hidden in the art portrayed in "The Da Vinci Code", which were allegedly hidden by the Renaissance artists themselves, these seem to have been hidden by the modern-day criminal mastermind, which basically makes him about as believable as a Batman villain, since he can't seem to commit a crime without leaving behind a puzzle to solve, which opens up the possibility of someone really smart foiling his plot. So "shenanigans" has to be called on this, because the really evil people in the world just DO THEIR BAD THING without tipping their hand in any way.
I'm glad that I didn't read this in book form first, therefore I was able to still be surprised by the twists and turns of the plot, I think that was important. I did read the first two books in the series, though. I've had "Ready Player One" in my "must-read" pile for a while now, but since that film is coming out next year, I've got much less motivation now to read it before the film's release.
I did fall asleep about 10 minutes in on this film, I admit it. And I kept having to force myself awake, returning to that point and trying again, but finally I fell asleep at about 1 am and slept for a few hours. So I woke up again at about 4 am Friday and stayed awake until the end, then went back to sleep around 6 am. As you might imagine, this sort of behavior radically affects my ability to get to work later that morning at a decent hour. I think once the craziness of the Christmas holiday is over, I need to start getting some more solid sleep at a more regular, non-vampire-like schedule. I've got about four days after Christmas to rest up before starting again.
Also starring Felicity Jones (last seen in "True Story"), Omar Sy (last seen in "Burnt"), Ben Foster (last seen in "Lone Survivor"), Irrfan Khan (last seen in "Jurassic World"), Sidse Babett Knudsen, Ana Ularu, Ida Darvish, Paul Ritter, Gabor Urmai, Philip Arditti.
RATING: 6 out of 10 violinists (performing in a flooded room, for some reason...)
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