“The greatest sins in human history were committed in the name of love .” –Robert Langdon, Inferno

This movie is a perfect example of how movie-makers ruin amazing books. So I’m a little biased going into this because Dan Brown is one of my all-time favorite authors so it was hard to live up to. But this movie was bad. Like, it wasn’t a good movie but also, it completely missed the entire point of the ending of the book. I’m going to try not to rant, but I make no promises.

SPOILER ALERT

The end of this book has a crazy twist. We seriously spend the whole book running around, following clues, getting away from the police, and when we get to “that spot,” the contagion has already been released and was now completely spread through the entire population! WHAT?!? So now, the big question that the group has to decide (which we don’t hear the answer to) is if they want to (1) figure out a way to stop the contagion or (2) leave it because although it was a horrible thing to do – making 1/3 of the entire population infertile – it may have actually saved the human race from overpopulation. The book makes you contimplate the question of “what would I choose?” in such a good way that it sticks with you for days – or at least it did for me.

BUT THE MOVIE COMPLETELY RUINED THIS. Instead of a contagion to make part of the population infertile, it was like, some bomb or something that just straight up kills people. Just BOOM, right then and there. AND because it was a bomb, there was no crazy twist of “it’s already been released” so the end of the movie turned into a stereotypical hero-saves-the-day-just-in-the-nick-of-time instead of literally anything else or better than that.

SUMMARY

It’s a shame that a movie that had an amazing book behind it and an awesome cast could go so bad. This movie flopped in the box office and, based on people who would have read the book and those that hadn’t, I’m not surprised. Dan Brown writes amazing books and people keep messing up the movies.

GRADE: F