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Rating: Country: USA Release Date: November 24, 2009 Distributor: Sony Director: · Ron Howard Cast: · Tom Hanks · Ewan McGregor · Ayelet Zurer · Stellan Skarsgård · Armin Mueller-Stahl Related Sites: · IMDb: Angels & Demons Grade: B-

Through the magic of Hollywood, Dan Brown's precursor to The Da Vinci Code has been transformed into the story's sequel, placing "Angels & Demons" into a world where the Catholic church has an established bias against master symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) for his mucking about with the Holy Grail legend. However, the church also has an immediate need for Langdon's talents as the church meets in conclave to elect a new pope -- with the four leading candidates taken captive by a seemingly resurgent Illuminati who taunt the authorities with arcane riddles and ambigrammatic symbols.

As the four cardinals are fated to die by means allusive to the four main elements -- earth, air, fire and water -- the real kicker is the sci-fi antimatter bomb that awaits our heroes at the end of this diabolical breadcrumb trail. The bomb, fueled by a quantum particle stolen from CERN, is the reason why the Vatican has also called in Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), a particle physicist attached to the CERN project, who specializes in the studies of bio-entanglement. This immediately sidetracked me: Even if the anti-matter bomb is removed from Rome (and, honestly, do you really think the city is going to be blown up in the film?), the other two anti-matter particles -- being entangled with the third -- should react with similar resonance; meaning no matter where the bomb explodes, CERN might get hit twice as hard when the two entangled particles share the experience of the third. But I'm not a particle physicist, and I digress...

Whereas "The Da Vinci Code" had Langdon finding obscure symbols and solving veiled riddles with a certain urgency, "Angels & Demons" -- while having an even more condensed urgency -- lacks the same thrill of the hunt, as it boils down to a "find the angel, which way is it pointing, go that way to the next angel" formula.

Ewan McGregor does an admirable job portraying Camerlengo Patrick McKenna as a young, potential new Pope, and if you haven't read the book or seen the film already, you almost find yourself following along thinking, "Yeah, this guy has some good ideas. Why do those old cardinals fear change so much?" At the same time, Swiss Guard Commander Richter (Stellan Skarsgård) seems just shady and stony enough to be a villain with an agenda, so that all the necessary characters seem to be well-secured in their established roles and places by the film's halfway mark.

This two-disc extended edition includes an expanded version of the theatrical release, and comes with a number of bonus features. On the first disc are several behind-the-scenes documentaries, such as "Rome Was Not Built in a Day." Unsurprisingly, the Vatican wasn't exactly cooperative with the filming crew (particularly after having made "The Da Vinci Code," as life begins to imitate art), so many of the settings -- like the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter's Square -- had to be recreated. "Writing Angels & Demons" spends about ten minutes looking at the basic challenges of translating the novel into a screenplay, and "Characters in Search of a True Story" is a dissertation on the various characters of the film and the effort to make them as believable as possible. The first disc wraps with a fifteen minute documentary on "CERN: Pushing the Frontiers of Knowledge" with director Ron Howard and Tom Hanks talking about the research being done there. For quantum physics junkies, this one was pretty cool to see.

The second disc is entirely devoted to special features, and includes a documentary on the film props, a deeper look at the making of "Angels & Demons," and an interview with John Langdon, the artist behind the ambigrams used in the book and the namesake for Brown's character.

Previews on this release include "2012" and "The Da Vinci Code." The second disc has previews for "Julie & Julia," "An Education," and "The Maiden Heist."