Angels & Demons

We went to watch the much-hyped ‘Angels and Demons’ yesterday.
It goes almost without saying that all the critics panned it, which probably was in itself a good enough reason to go to the cinema and watch this movie.
As I hadn’t read the book by Dan Brown, I didn’t have any yardstick to judge this movie by and I can honestly say that I enjoyed it. There are enough twists in the plot to keep you interested for the whole 140 minutes of it.
There are some very nice shots of Rome, going beyond the predictable (that’s lots of churches for you) and some seriously fast driving (even by Roman standards) right in the middle of the city. The movie will probably bring one or two more tourists to Rome... as if there weren’t enough of the fcukers anyway.
Personally I could find only one or two unlikely moments in the movie. The first is when Ewan McGregor (impersonating a Catholic priest who was very close to the dead Pontiff) saves Vatican City and all the cardinals from destruction by grabbing the lethal device that’s going to explode in 3 minutes, taking off in a helicopter and flying it as high as possible and parachuting himself to safety onto St. Peter’s Square just before the device goes off in the empty, pilot-less helicopter hovering above Rome. Come on!! A priest piloting a chopper..?!? Even the most gullible among you will have to admit that it is incredibly unusual, virtually bordering on the impossible.
The second improbable moment is when McGregor find himself only a few steps away from being chosen as the new Pope. You don’t have to be a devout Catholic to realise that this event is certainly as far-fetched as the election of an extreme reactionary, backward, Nazi sympathiser as the new Pontiff. And we all know that this would never happen in reality of course.