Blu-ray Review: Angels & Demons

It only seems like five minutes ago I reviewed The Da Vinci Code’s Blu-ray outing as Angels & Demons received its theatrical release.  Now, never ones to miss a cross-promotion opportunity, Sony provides the BD release of Robert Langdon’s second theatrical outing just as Dan Brown’s latest cash cow is about to hit book retailers with a weighty thwack.  Sadly US residents are going to have to wait until November to see this disc.

While the book is a prequel to The Da Vinci Code, this movie adaptation is set after the religious romp and sees Tom Hanks reprise his role as Robert Langdon, fortunately with a far more sensible haircut this time.

Whereas TDVC hopped from location to location, Angels & Demons action primarily takes place over the course of an evening in a single location.
Under the guise of the shadowy Illuminati, a mysterious someone has stolen a canister of antimatter from the Hadron Collider (where Gordon Freeman simply has to work, preparing for a resonance cascade) and kidnapped four leading bishops who are in-line to become the next Pope of the Catholic church.  The scoundrel is saying that each Bishop will be executed in a suitably grizzly fashion at a particular time unless someone can track them down before biblical wrath is laid down.  Oh and the antimatter canister will explode as soon as the battery runs down, laying waste to Vatican City.  So no pressure then.

Fortunately that someone is Robert Langdon, who has been petitioning the Vatican since has last religious sojourn to allow him access to their archives to continue his writing.
Langdon is collected and stuck on a plane to Rome to assist, and immediately comes into contact with the movies grumpy Swiss Guard chief (Stellan Skarsgard) and Sophie Neauveau substitute Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Azurer) who just happens to be a brilliant physicist and is also rather pleasing on the eye.

While the Bishops are locked in a debate to choose the next Pope, Camerlengo Patrick McKenna (Ewan McGregor) is temporarily placed in charge of the Vatican, and immediately gives Langdon the access he requires.

What follows is a tightly plotted series of hops around Vatican City following clues to the location of the next Bishop.  As with TDVC there is a sub-plot of “not everything is quite as it seems”, and some slight misdirection that is perhaps a little too obvious.  Of course nobody is parading around in the background carrying a banner saying “He looks a bit shifty, doesn’t he?” but it doesn’t take a genius to work out who is really the mastermind behind the attacks.  Be sure to watch the movie before the special features of course, as they blow the plot entirely.

As a two and a quarter hour movie it is closer to a thriller but without quite enough thrills than an action movie.  Unlike its predecessor, this movie is a much tighter experience and there aren’t any particularly long exposition scenes here.  While it isn’t the most exciting movie you will watch this year, there is an enjoyable workman like quality to Angels & Demons that often comes from Ron Howard’s movies.

It would be easy to describe Angels & Demons as middle class, middle of the road filmmaking but it would be doing something of a disservice to what is actually a surprisingly fun movie.  I will readily confess that before I watched it, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to doing so.  Not that I have anything against Dan Brown, Tom Hanks, Ron Howard or anyone else involved in the movie, but it felt like it was going to be something of a chore to watch it.  As it turned out, I was pleasantly surprised by the pacing, story and acting.

Regardless of what I say, Angels & Demons has already made a fortune for Sony Pictures, and will continue to do so in home disc format.  It might not set the world alight, but if you are looking for a well directed, acted, scored and edited movie you can do far worse than give Angels & Demons a try.

Audio Visual
Angels & Demons is presented in the Sony standard MPEG4 encode at 1080p and as you would expect for a new release, everything looks pristine.
Colours around the Vatican City are rich and detailed, particularly as the sun is setting.  As the action switches to night and murky interior sets black levels are rock solid and there is nothing to fault here at all.

The intricately detailed rooms inside the Vatican look beautiful, and even the CG blends fairly well.  As filming inside the actual Vatican was completely off limits many sets are recreated in the studio with a lot of green screens and blended in post production.  Apart from the helicopter sequence towards the end of the movie, I never noticed the joins between the real and digitally created worlds.  This is a great transfer.

On the audio front things are a little more interesting because every Sony Pictures disc I have reviewed so far has used Dolby TrueHD audio.  Angels & Demons bucks the trend and delivers a DTS HD Master Audio soundtrack that is as suitably workmanlike as the visuals.

Deep bass is particularly impressive during scenes such as the firing of the Hadron Collider at the start of the movie, and the climactic helicopter sequence.  Other scenes lack a little in overall punch, but then environmental audio makes up for these shortcomings with plenty going on in the rear channels for much of the movie.

To be fair, a Dolby TrueHD track would probably have sounded just as good here, but I have always favoured DTS HD MA and am intrigued to see if Sony continue to use this as their codec in the future.
Overall a very impressive looking and sounding disc.

Bonus Features
I have yet to mention that this Blu-ray disc contains both the Theatrical and Extended cuts of the movie.  But unlike the lengthy additions to the Da Vinci Code Extended cut, the difference here is a mere seven minutes.  To be perfectly honest the Extended Cut just adds a bullet point to the box and removes the need for a deleted scenes section.  This is basic exposition stuff, nothing particularly different.

As per usual, extra bonus points go to Sony for providing all of the bonus features in 1080p HD.

MovieIQ – Got an internet enabled BD Live player?  MovieIQ is a new feature that is included on Angels & Demons that provides informational text throughout the movie covering many facets of the movie.

Powered by Gracenote, MovieIQ is probably best described as being a Wiki for movies and the information you can access changes as the scenes in the movie alter.  For a far better description of the feature (including some handy screenshots), check out this Engadget article.

I must confess that like many other folks I do find BD Live to be a little bit pointless (and slow) but this is the first feature I have genuinely enjoying using.  It’s rather fancy watching the information update as the scenes change.  I’ve always enjoyed informational text tracks, but having them become more interactive like this is a bonus.

The Path of Illumination – This is the main feature on the disc, it’s essentially a series of behind the scenes featurettes put together as an interactive map, and the official blurb says “in which viewers follow Robert Langdon’s journey through Rome, exploring architecture, discovering new facts, seeing additional behind-the-scenes footage and interviews from each location, and discovering more about the four altars of science — all in the quest to unlock the path of illumination.”

So like I said, it’s a fancy interactive map but it’s good fun.

Rome Was Not Built In A Day & Angels & Demons: The Full Story – I have lumped these two featurettes together because they effectively make up a single documentary that has been split up into two pieces.  And somewhat bizarrely the “Full Story” version is the shorter of the two.

Head scratching aside, this is a comprehensive documentary that covers all of the key aspects of the films production, featuring lengthy discussions with the crew.  In fact these documentaries unusually only feature a few soundbites from Tom Hanks, letting the behind the scenes folks take centre stage for once.
This is way ahead of many puff PR pieces that tend to adorn these discs, reminiscent of some of the Bond documentaries.  Although nowhere near that comprehensive, this is well worth a watch.

CERN: Pushing the Frontiers of Knowledge – Want to watch something that will make you feel intellectually barren?  This 15 minute featurette goes behind the scenes at the CERN institute (where the Hadron Collider is located).  If you can don’t get lost when the scientists start talking about their work then you are a smarter person than I.  But it is well worth a watch to see what some of the finest minds in the world are working on.

Summing Up
In many ways I enjoyed Angels & Demons more than The Da Vinci Code.  The story itself is more basic, but keeping the action in one location over the course of a few hours makes for a more exciting experience that moves at a brisk enough pace to avoid boredom.

This Blu-ray disc looks and sounds superb, the bonus features are comprehensive without being over-the-top-exhaustive and the BD Live features actually add something worthwhile to the presentation.
All told this is a great disc that is well worth investigating.

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