A Review of Angels & Demons

How the superb use of the 9 Ingredients can be sabotaged by one major mistake

Angels & Demons is a superb film.  Magnificent in every way a thriller should be magnificent – unfortunately it commits one fatal.

       A Hitchcockian Mystery thriller who-done-it that is a near masterpiece, but has one fatal flaw that will keep it from grossing $250-$300 million in the US.

It is rumored Hitchcock sat up in his grave and applauded when he saw the film. 

He should have.  It is loaded with the 9 Ingredients:

·              It has Undeserved Misfortune that results in both fear and pity for numerous characters. 

·              It has superb Curiosity in both the Mystery and Superior Position modes.

·              It has superb Visible Villains You Love to Hate, and more than one. 

·              It has the Hero (and Heroine) par excellance.

·              It explodes with Jeopardy and Sword of Damocles and wreaks with Conflict and Clash of Wills.

·              Like Superman, Mrs. Doubtfire, Tootsie and others, it sets up the ground rules of Credibility and asks us to accept them, and they are very acceptable McGuffins – Hitchcock’s word for it – and stays solidly within the Credibility through the entire picture, with a very minor lapse or two along the way.  “What if…?” runs throughout the picture.

·              It is a superb – one of the all time great exponents of another Ingredient that is a key to having a colossal box office hit – the Ingredient of Beat the Clock.   (Beat the Clock means one or more characters have to achieve something within a certain timeframe or something bad will happen, usually a disaster:  The innocent prisoner will be executed at midnight if they don’t get new evidence to the Governor in time; the race to find the bomb which is timed to go off in two hours and 36 minutes; the urgent need to stop a wedding before the girl marries the wrong guy (Graduate, Three Men and a Little Lady) … and dozens and dozens more. 

There are two Ingredients missing, and one colossal mistake these great filmmakers made that hurts the picture’s US box office success.

The first Ingredient it fails to have is a minor one – Humor.  Humor is a key ingredient and when done right increases the box office potential by a quantum leap.  Night at the Museum, Some Like it Hot, Tootsie, Beverly Hills Cop, Whole 9 Yards, Arsenic and Old Lace, Get Shorty.)  While the absence of Humor does not kill Angels and Demons box office potential, it would have enhanced it to some degree. 

But the next two mistakes seriously hurt the US box office and one seriously killed its chances to be a $300 million US grossing picture, which it otherwise clearly should have been.

The first mistake is there is no Love Story.  Filmmakers, even the best - and with Angels and Demons you have the very best in the world – fail to learn from the all time US box office colossus, Titanic, which is the only picture to ever gross over $600 million in the US alone, the single, most important of the 9 Ingredients is the Love Story, as the film, Love Story, clearly showed us so many years before Titanic clearly demonstrated once again so many years later.  The giant talents of Brian Grazer and Ron Howard failed to develop a beautiful Love Story between Tom Hanks and Ayelet Zurer, which they plopped before our eyes and made us beg to see develop fully and richly.  But after Fingerposting we were going to be in for a good Love Story, they failed to deliver it. 

The second mistake is fatal and destroyed at least a third to a half of this Hitchockian masterpiece’s US box office potential. 

That mistake was Controversy, not Controversy by itself, because the right kind of Controversy is box office gold – but it had the wrong kind of Controversy – the absolutely fatal kind because it alienates a large part of your audience, up to half, instead of the right kind of Controversy which intrigues the audience that is offended by it instead of driving them away. 

Angels & Demons will do twice as much business overseas than the US because around the world the Catholic Church is not held with such high esteem, and people do not particularly care about what church authorities say as they do in the US where the airwaves – radio and cable – are filled with a handful with Catholic fanatics who are loudly condemning the film as being anti-Catholic – which it isn’t!

(My Catholic credential includes teaching theology at Loyola University, Mount St. Mary’s, Marymount and Oxidental Colleges while still in my early 20’s, and having been chosen by the Jesuits to debate the prestigious Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich on the problem of good and evil in God at a major ecumenical conference put on by Loyola University.)

What is the right kind of Controversy? 

And why do we say the right kind of Controversy is box office gold?

98% of documentaries never reach the big screen, and if a documentary does play in feature film theaters, they are lucky to do $5 million, $10 million and rarely $20 million at the box office.  Fahrenheit 911, because of its white-hot controversial nature, did over $135 million at the US box office alone. 

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ  which was a very one-sided and in many ways seriously wrong depiction of the crucifixion of Christ, did $370.3 million at the US box office alone.  Why?  Because it attracted mostly believers, but also cynics and the critics and nay-sayers who wanted to be armed to be able to refute the believers.  Years ago Martin Scorcese’s film, The Temptation of Christ, did not have the right kind of Controversy, and so it was unreleasable ($8,373,585).  

Not only does the right kind of Controversy work for any kind of film such as a political film, or a religious film, it even works for pornography - a pornographic film.  Deep Throat has done an astonishing amount of over $600 million.  Why?  Because it became the most controversial film of its time.  My friend, Alan Dershowitz, rose to its defense when the Catholic Church got it banned in one city, and then got other cities to ban it as well, creating a Curiosity for the film unmatched before or since.  Dozens of people I know, who would never be caught dead watching such a film, actually waited in their cars until the film started because they did not want to be seen by the neighbors going to see a film that their moral principles were totally opposed to. 

So what could have overcome this fatal defect in Angels & Demons for the US box office? 

They could have had a character in the film – and the girl scientist would have been a perfect choice – to present a very positive role of the Church in the field of science, presenting a precise knowledge of embryology which shows why those who oppose abortion are correct, or those who oppose stem cell research from embryos instead of from other cells are also correct, and then have Tom Hanks or someone else present the argument as to why its really an issue of women having the right to decide what to do with their own bodies – and chastise her for not supporting that because she’s a woman.

That’s just one possible example, there are dozens of other ways in which the Church could be defended against its massive failures in the past, and put on the right plane of today’s scientific community, however the people on the screen may have disagreed with it.  Presenting the positives the Catholic Church has done in science – and there are very few – would have given the film the right kind of Controversy, the kind that would attract large numbers of Catholics who would be offended by the Hanks character’s evaluation of the Church’s role, and have someone stand up for the Church. 

Putting aside the Catholic controversy, and the ability of the Church’s talking heads to seriously impact the US box office gross, Angels & Demons is a masterpiece of Hitchcockian thriller/who-done-it mystery with another one of the minor Ingredients, reasons people go to a movie – Peripity – superbly done at the end of the film.  No one will ever guess the ending or the Peripity, where a character or element in the film suddenly changes into its opposite.  In this film the Peripity, the changing into its opposite, is as superbly and magically done as any film has ever done it. 

Unless you read the book, you will never guess how this film ends. 

Our hats go off to Howard, Grazer and Hanks for one of the great Hitchcockian masterpieces since Hitchcock stopped making them.