Ron Howard says mea culpa with Angels & Demons

"Now, where have I seen him before?" you ask as the handsome priest Patrick McKenna (Ewan McGregor) rushes around the Vatican arranging this meeting and that conference in Angels & Demons , the film of Dan Brown's bestseller, which had its premiere last night. And then you remember: McKenna/McGregor looks very like Georg Gänswein, the German priest and personal secretary of Pope Benedict XVI, known to the Italians as Bel Giorgio ("Gorgeous Georg").

Another recognizable face is that of Tom Hanks, who plays the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon. If he seems familiar it's because he had the very same role in the film of Dan Brown's other bestseller, The Da Vinci Code. But because many people found that film tedious, director Ron Howard has speeded up Angels & Demons so Hanks spends a lot of his time running across Roman rooftops and running through secret Vatican passageways. In between, he says things like this:

"The Illuminati did not become violent until the 17th Century. Their name means 'The Enlightened Ones'. They were physicists, mathematicians, astronomers. In the 1500's they started meeting in secret, because they were concerned about the church's inaccurate teachings. They were dedicated to scientific truth. And the Vatican didn't like that. So the church began to, how did you say it? Oh, hunt them down and kill them."

Following the death of the Pope, the Illuminati have kidnapped four cardinals and placed a bomb in Vatican City. At 8pm the first cardinal is found dead, and Robert Langdon has until midnight to find the killer, save the other cardinals, find the bomb and save the world. He's got the help of a smart and sexy nuclear physicist (Ayelet Zurer), however. This is good because Stellan Skarsgård, the hostile head of the Swiss Guard does not trust him, and the sly Cardinal Strauss (Armin Mueller-Stahl) keeps saying things like "Religion is flawed, but only because men is [sic] flawed".

And this is the central point of Angels & Demons: Yes, there are some bad people in the Catholic Church, but the institution is good and science is certainly not better because it keeps trying to create things, like antimatter bombs, that could kill millions. 

Director Ron Howard was widely criticized for making what many regarded as an "anti-Catholic" film in The Da Vinci Code. This time, he is much less critical of religion, and many of those at the premiere last night felt that Angels & Demons was a gorgeous,big-budget Hollywood mea culpa.