Angels & Demons – Perfect Suspense. Now, Just Add Romance.

Angels & Demons is both a book and a movie that seems to have slicked through and out the collective consciousness of most people, which seems rather odd.  The book was a best seller — although not as big as Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code.   I never did read Angels & Demons. I stopped at Code. So the only thing I know about the book is what I know of the story from the movie.

The movie came and went with nary a ripple in movieland.  Which seems to be pity, because in many respects, it’s a textbook example of how a good thriller should work.

The whole story, once the preliminaries have been set up, takes place in four hours.  And there’s a deadline: midnight, when Vatican City — one of the most precious places on earth for a good portion of the civilized world — will blow up using a device that will symbolically declare victory of science over religion, once the five cardinals who are next in line to become pope have died very messy, painful and public deaths.  Very high stakes indeed.

There’s clues, ancient riddles, symbols and the clock is ticking.  Disasters throw the good guys off the trail time and again, and you’re never really sure who the bad guys are, either.  They just seem invincible and utterly ruthless and with each cardinal’s death that fact is driven home.

Every essential thriller element is working at 100% in Angels & Demons.

Except one.  And I suspect that this is why the movie doesn’t stick in the mind.  It’s like a Chinese meal:  Great while you’re watching it.  A thrill a minute.  But you’ve forgotten it twenty minutes later.

The missing element is the personal factor for the hero.  Robert Langdon, the protagonist, gets involved in the adventure for no better reason than that he is asked and he can’t resist the lure of a puzzle involving ancient symbols.  Yes, the stakes prove to be dire and dreadful, once he’s involved, but they’re still impersonal as far as he’s concerned.  He even confesses to the Camerlengo Patrick McKenna that he’s an atheist, so it’s not even like he’s doing it for his god.  The scriptwriters do their best to pump up the character’s motivations, but they’re working with dry material on this wicket.  There’s not much to work with there, without inventing whole new storylines and subplots…and that would have enraged millions of movie-goers who adored the original book.  (PS:  I’m assuming this is why there was no personal involvement for Langdon.  As I said, I haven’t read the book.)

One of the Hollywood production teams who have learned this lesson really well in past years are the James Bond franchise.  The James Bond movies used to be exactly the same way:  Slick, fast, high-stakes thrillers that had you gripping your seat for two hours, but you could shrug the movie off the moment you walked out of the theatre.

With the introduction of the new James Bond, Daniel Craig, another factor was injected into the movies:  Emotions.  Personal stakes for Bond.  In Casino Royale he did the unthinkable.  He — gasp – fell in love.  In Quantum of Solace he heavily disguised his mission of vengeance for the death of the woman he loved so that even M didn’t realize what he was up to until the end.  In both movies Bond hurts physically and emotionally, and movie-goers everywhere rate the new James Bond far above any of the old stuff.  You end up cheering for the good guy when he fights for and gets the prize he really, really not just wants but needs.

Robert Langdon in Angels & Demons didn’t come close to really needing anything in the movie.  He wanted to solve the puzzle, and later felt a responsibility to save lives.  That was about it.  He didn’t get to hurt physically (much) or emotionally.

As I’m a romance writer, I noticed the gaping, yawning absence of a romance sub-plot, too.

The “Romantic Interest” is standard fare for Hollywood and its absence is almost unusual in thrillers.  In this particular case, if the writers had taken liberties with the plot, this would have been an instant and easy way for Langdon to become emotionally involved in the story.

There was already a pretty heroine to hand.  The nuclear physicist, Vittoria Vetra, would have neatly divided Langdon’s loyalties.  She represented science.  Langdon was working for the Vatican, the leaders of religion.  If she had been put in jeopardy at any point (and the bad guys were very good at putting people in jeopardy in creative and seriously mind-boggling ways) then Langdon would have had to make the decision:  save the girl (science) or the cardinals (religion)…save the woman he likes/loves/used to love (depending on how you set up the romance storyline) or let her die while he does his duty?  Suddenly, the stakes have become very personal.

You could raise those stakes even higher, too.  At the beginning of the movie you could have the heroine ask Langdon not to take the job.  Perhaps they knew each other before, and she doesn’t want him to be around while she’s at the Vatican.  It’s her mess.  She’ll clean it up herself and resents that they’ve called him in to fix it.  More personal conflict for Langdon to deal with.  And none of it extends the storyline or storytime overly much.

I haven’t really got started on ways to put Langdon’s emotions through the mill.  If you dismantled the story even more you could work some seriously big time issues into Langdon’s life and make it utterly miserable for him while he’s saving Vatican City.

These quick thoughts I’ve outlined are just me cracking my knuckles.  Angels & Demons is such a text-book example of the perfect thriller, I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if you added romance to it and stirred.  Romantic suspense is an abiding passion of mine, after all.

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