Congratulations to Ron Howard!

Rating: 7/10 (13 June 2009)

No doubt Ron Howard is the great hero of this movie and has proved to be a truly professional and skilled director: he has perfectly understood the nature of Dan Brown's novel and the aim of the production, thus being the result a well-focused, well made and well performed product that will certainly be a top box-office movie.
Dan Brown wrote this impressive thriller, made of action, suspense, paradoxical and surprising twists, with the aim of selling. Ron Howard spares no effort and succeeds in rendering the same thrilling and engaging story, based on a well consolidated narrative outline, where we find the trustworthy hero, Robert Langdon, capable of unraveling every mysterious sign and leading us to a shocking finale. Everything, of course, sounds too excessive, there is a crescendo of excess, at the limit of ridiculous, but what is worth underlining is the typical capability of Hollywood great productions to take their job very seriously, and to make a good product out of nothing, being both them and the viewer conscious of the real nature of what is being displayed. What counts is that the final result is an aesthetically good and entertaining movie: and it is, indeed.
Evidently, the movie, like the book, represents no threat to the unbreakable solidness of the Roman Catholic Church, and even less to the faith of real faithful people. The fears and reluctance of clerical authorities when the movie was distributed, sounded a little excessive, too (and indeed, in the end even L'Osservatore Romano gave it a favourable review). It is not even a thought-provoking movie, at least it offers no new or interesting perspective: the ancient, and let's admit, quite old-fashioned (but probably not so out of fashion) dichotomy between science and religion, is just a pretext on which to build a strong and till the end entertaining story, still able to attract millions of viewers all over the world: all the remaining nonsense is forgivable.
The whole cast prove good performances, Tom Hanks is a certainty from the beginning, being however in my opinion Ewan Macgregor (the Camerlengo) the most interesting character, and the one with whom Langdon has the only interesting exchange on faith, but all actors (even "our" Pierfrancesco Favino) contribute to the enthralling atmosphere of the story.