Angels & Demons (2009) on Netflix
PG-1320092h 18mMysteryThriller
Four cardinals vanish the night the conclave meets to name a new pope. Stolen antimatter is hidden in Vatican City, and symbologist Robert Langdon and scientist Vittoria Vetra are called in.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb6.7/10328,567 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes37%
Trailer
Plot summary
Pope Pius XVI has died, and the cardinals gather in conclave to elect his successor. At CERN, Dr. Vittoria Vetra finds the priest Silvano Bentivoglio murdered and one of their antimatter canisters gone. Four of the preferiti are then abducted by a group claiming to be the Illuminati, and the Vatican is told that one cardinal will die each hour from eight in the evening until midnight, when the antimatter will destroy the city. The Vatican police call in Robert Langdon, a Harvard symbologist, and he and Vetra have a few hours to follow the clues.
Cast
- Franklin Amobias Cardinal Lamasse
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Angels & Demons (2009)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Catholic Church officials had been offended by The Da Vinci Code and forbade filming in their churches, so those scenes were shot at Sony, with the Caserta Palace doubling for the inside of the Vatican and the Biblioteca Angelica standing in for the Vatican Library.
- Production designer Allan Cameron sent twenty crew members into the Sistine Chapel posing as ordinary members of the public to photograph as much as they could, then had artists sketch and enlarge the paintings and mosaics from those pictures. He deliberately recreated the chapel as it looked before the frescoes were restored, for the contrast between muted colors and the cardinals' red.
- St Peter's Basilica would not fit on a stage: the 80-foot soundstages were half the height of the real church, so Allan Cameron and visual effects supervisor Angus Bickerton rebuilt the crypts and the bottoms of the columns beneath the Baldachin with Saint Peter's statue, and ringed it with a 360 degree greenscreen for the rest to be added digitally.
- Saint Peter's Square and the Piazza Navona were the same piece of backlot: once the Square scenes were done, the crew spent six weeks knocking down the Basilica side and digging out three and a half feet of tarmac to build the fountain.
- Filming stopped for a moment when Tom Hanks helped an Australian bride get through the crowds so she would not be late for her own wedding.
- Samoa's film censor, Lei'ataua Olo'apu, banned the film outright for being critical of the Catholic Church and to avoid religious discrimination against it; the Samoa Observer pointed out that the censor was himself Catholic, and his board had already banned The Da Vinci Code.
- Catholic League president William A. Donohue stopped short of calling a boycott but urged Catholics to tell others the story rested on "malicious myths, intentionally advanced by Ron Howard"; Howard answered that a film in which Langdon protects the Church, and which shows priests who support science, could hardly be called anti-Catholic.
- The film's stolen-antimatter plot pushed CERN into putting up a website of its own explaining what the laboratory actually does and what antimatter is.
