Religious (Anti)matters

Rating: 7/10 (19 August 2019)

While I like Tom Hanks, I'm not a big fan of religious machinations, so I watched this with some skepticism. I was quickly turned around.
This taut thriller directed by Ron Howard keeps you on your toes as a Harvard historian (Robert Langdon played by Hanks) is called in by the Vatican police to find who deployed a bomb using antimatter stolen from CERN that will destroy central Rome in 24 hours.
Langdon teams up with the CERN scientist who created the antimatter, and together they slowly catch up with the hired hand who is killing papal candidates (the pope appears to have died, but was actually murdered). Plenty of potential evildoers are highlighted, from shadowy Illuminati who leave too many clues, to a cardinal who seems to eager to become the next pope, to the deceased pope's personal servant, to the chief of the Swiss guard sworn to protect the pope.
In the end, the day is saved and a new pope is elected, but not before an antimatter blast lights up the skies above Rome at the proverbial midnight hour. This is one of the many forgivable gaffes in the film, as a 1 gram antimatter explosion even high in the sky would have blasted Rome anyway. There's a reason 5 kiloton nuclear weapons are detonated well above ground as they drop, to maximize blast damage. At least the film, unlike the book, shows some damage being done. There are other little weaknesses in the plot (an experienced assassin who gets in a getaway car supplied by his contractor without worrying about said contractor wanting to erase all traces of the crime?!). Nothing that requires enough suspension of disbelief to ruin the plot, though. As always, view the film on its own merits rather than worrying about the book, which of course has more motivation, more detail, more character development.
It's a (antimatter) blast, and even after the denouement (which was not easy to guess ahead of time because there were, as I said, plenty of bad-guy-candidates), one could see the film again for all the loving little details.