I’ve made no secret about my love of Dan Brown’s novels on this site. Yes, it’s mostly fluff. But it’s fast-paced, page turning fluff. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the movies, as Da Vinci Code ended up being a boorish slog with bad Tom Hanks hair. Angels & Demons was certainly an improvement, but it still lacked that special Dan Brown-ness left you unable to put down his books.
Now we’re getting Inferno, and I guess third time’s the charm. Or is that fourth time, as star Hanks and director Ron Howard have decided to completely skip over The Lost Symbol, the third book in the Robert Langdon series, and instead adapt the latest novel. A novel which I actually just read earlier in the year, and which actually had some pretty big ideas and rather heavy doomsday repercussions.
Whether the movie will have the stones to follow Brown’s narrative properly or whether it will take some narrative licence is uncertain, but this first teaser trailer for the film at least at the fact that there will be some serious moral quandaries being posed to Hanks’ Langdon. There’s a major plot twist in the book (which I won’t give away here) that works brilliantly in print, but which I have no idea how they would adapt for the screen, and this teaser trailer certainly offers no clues.
Check it out below.
Inferno finds the famous Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) on a trail of clues tied to the great Dante himself. When Langdon wakes up in an Italian hospital with amnesia, he teams up with Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones), a doctor he hopes will help him recover his memories. Together, they race across Europe and against the clock to foil a deadly global plot.
One of the other big differences in Inferno when it comes to all the other Robert Langdon stories, is that we meet him mid-way through the tale, except thanks to some inconvenient amnesia, he doesn’t know how he got there. For a guy who always tends to know how to solve mysteries, having himself as the puzzle makes for a nice change of pace, as Howard explained to EW:
“Langdon is thrust into this crisis without knowing why or how he got there or what his role is. It gave Tom a lot to play with. And it allowed me to stage this as a modern psychological thriller.”
Inferno also stars Ben Foster, Irrfan Khan, Omar Sy, and Sidse Babett Knudsen. It is scheduled for release on October 14, 2016.
Last Updated: May 9, 2016
