Descent of man

It’s a bit amusing while watching the third book-based film to star Tom Hanks as Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon to remember the fuss everyone made over the first one. Back in 2006, when The Da Vinci Code was being debated on every cable news show and dissected in religious and cultural journals, novelist Dan Brown’s conspiracy theories seemed like serious business. Today, they just seem silly.

That’s not to say Christians weren’t justified in feeling offended. But as Brown’s brand of dilettante paranoia now finds its inevitable culmination in what can only be described as schlock, it’s hard to remember why anyone should have felt threatened by his earlier plot-hole-ridden work.

Inferno (rated PG-13 for profanity and some disturbing, Dantean images) is no more plausible, but with director Ron Howard apparently feeling more freedom to depart from Brown’s text to inject his own sense of irony, it is considerably more fun. And unexpectedly, it carries far more thought-provoking themes than The Da Vinci Code, with its trappings of “lost gospels” and secret sects, could ever have hoped for.

When we catch up with Langdon, he’s once again in a picturesque Italian city—Florence—only this time he can’t remember how he got there. He awakes in a hospital with just enough time for a lovely young doctor, Sienna (Felicity Jones), to inform him he survived a bullet wound to the head before a Florentine police officer arrives, intent on taking a second shot. After they flee to Sienna’s apartment, Langdon discovers he’s in possession of a clue based on Botticelli’s painting of Dante’s Inferno that has the power to prevent a billionaire geneticist’s plan to depopulate half the earth via viral plague. Conveniently, along with being a doctor, Sienna also happens to be a fan of Langdon’s work and a Dante enthusiast to boot. Thus, she’s willing to risk life and limb on a wild art chase that might prevent the largest genocide the earth has ever known.

Coincidences pile up in the first half of the film, and while some are justified by a late major plot twist, it comes long after we’ve concluded the story has no intentions of believability. Yet even ludicrously confusing plotting and clunky dialogue can’t dim the warm glow of our generation’s Jimmy Stewart. With anyone else’s name on the marquee, this is B-grade, late-night cable fare at best. With Hanks, it’s a moderately diverting evening at the cinema.

The most interesting puzzle Inferno poses, though, isn’t why Hanks continues to lend his Oscar aura to substandard thrillers. It’s whether Howard’s subtextual rebuke of militant environmentalism is intentional.

Brown ends his Inferno novel by giving anti-humanists their due. The virus renders a third of the population infertile, and the World Health Organization decides not to try to reverse this result, seeing it as a mitigated good. Howard, wisely, will have none of this hairsplitting, and his changes are telling.

We meet villain Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster) giving something like a TED talk for halting population growth and being applauded by brilliant young people like himself. In fact, we soon come to see that all of Zobrist’s devotees are young, affluent, and well-educated. They’ve grown up inculcated with the message that mankind is merely one more animal on the planet, and the most destructive one. Within the parameters of their worldview, their crusade to cull the herd sounds moral, even courageous. Until, through Langdon’s nightmarish visions, we see the logical conclusion of their argument—wholesale slaughter of the only creature capable of love, reason, kindness, and creativity. The only creature, in short, to bear God’s image.

“Kids—,” one character jokes to Langdon, turning the old 1960s maxim about not trusting people over 30 on its head, “they’re intolerable until they’re at least 35.” As Howard’s Inferno demonstrates, if we teach the next generation that people are a “cancer,” we shouldn’t be surprised when their love for the planet turns to hatred for mankind.