Some new stills from Angels and Demons are out and we were filled with joy to see that Tom Hanks has cut his hair. The long hair he wore in The Da Vinci Code was just ghastly. A shorter haircut will help his character symbologist Robert Langdon solve the mystery must faster. Well, at any rate he certainly looks a lot better.
Angels and Demons is based on the bestselling book by Dan Brown which was published before The Da Vinci Code. Much of the book is set in Rome at the Vatican. The Vatican is so grumpy about the film that it got director Ron Howards permits to film revoked at many locations in Rome.
Producer Brian Grazer
swears
that this film will be better than The Da Vinci Code and that Tom Hanks' hairstyle is far superior to the one he wore in the last film:
"It's totally different" from Hanks' slicked-back coif of the original, insists producer Brian Grazer. "It's better. Everything is more contemporary. "
The adaptation of Dan Brown's novel continues the sleuthing adventures of Robert Langdon (Hanks), a Harvard expert in religious symbols who discovers a conspiracy to destroy the Vatican.
Da Vinci collected $758 million worldwide, but even Grazer says the movie moved a little slowly. Angels, by contrast, sprints from crypts, catacombs and cathedrals.
In adapting the hugely successful Da Vinci novel, "I think we may have been too reverential toward it," Grazer says. "We got all the facts of the book right, but the movie was a little long and stagey."
In Angels, opening May 15, "Langdon doesn't stop and give a speech," Grazer says. "When he speaks, he's in motion."
Set in and around the Vatican, Brown's Angels includes the murders of cardinals, who are mutilated with mysterious symbols. Church officials banned the crew from shooting in key locales, sometimes revoking permits that had been approved, Grazer says.
*****
That doesn't mean Angels won't generate any controversy. The film centers on an act of terrorism at the Vatican and examines the tension between science and faith.
"We're living in a world that's much more unstable," Grazer says. "Therefore, our energy is focused on belief. This looks at what would happen when you have an act of terrorism designed to undermine that belief."
Despite the contemporary topics, Grazer says the movie has no political undertones. "Both parties, through different means, don't want terrorism to exist in the world," he says.
We're looking forward to seeing the film. There's no official word when Dan Brown will publish the next book in the series, The Solomon Key, but rumors say it will coincide with the release date of the Angels and Demons film, May 15, 2009.
