When a book is made into film, it’s a bittersweet moment for its readers, for most often the moving images don’t live up to the pages that moved us. But if it’s Ron Howard directing Tom Hanks for a Dan Brown novel, fans have little to worry about, as we have seen with The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons. Now that the third Robert Langdon film has hit the theatres, here’s what we are looking forward to the most in Inferno.
Be warned, spoilers abound.
HELL IN A CYLINDER
Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon wakes up in a Florence hospital and he is suffering from short-term memory loss, so he has no clue why he’s in Italy or who has been shooting at him. Inside his signature tweed jacket, Sienna Brooks, his doctor accomplice, finds a fascinating cylinder with a biohazard symbol. It is a cylinder seal with a Faraday pointer that casts an image of hell as described by the 14th century Italian poet Dante Alighieri in Divine Comedy and painted by Botticelli as La Mappa dell’Inferno or ‘The Map of Hell’. But this is no ordinary representation of the Renaissance painting, it has been altered by the genius antagonist, Bertrand Zobrist, and in the alteration lies the clue that might save the world.
A TOUR OF EUROPE
If The Da Vinci Code, the film, made us fall in love with Paris, Angels & Demons took our breath away with its stunning picturisation of Rome and the Vatican, and now we hope to tour Florence as Langdon and Sienna dodge armed cops and an assassin with spiked hair — from Boboli Gardens to Palazzo Vecchio, to the Old City, via the Vasari Corridor.
Then the action shifts to Venice and we’re looking forward to a glimpse of the Doge’s Palace and St. Mark’s Basilica, especially The Horses of St. Mark’s.
But you know what, they were not in the wrong museum, they were in the wrong country! They needed to be in Turkey.
So next on our cinematic itinerary is Istanbul, particularly Hagia Sophia, often called the eighth wonder of the world.
'DANTE’S DEATH MASK
This has to be the most fascinating object in the novel. This eerie-looking plaster cast showing Dante’s famous hooked nose is housed in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. It may be a priceless piece of history but it’s also a vital clue in Zobrist’s crazy scheme.
PS: We also can’t wait to see the look on museum official Marta Alvarez’s face when she sees from CCTV recordings that it was Langdon himself who stole the Death Mask and was now standing next to her, nonchalantly scanning the footage to catch the thief!
OUR IRRFAN AS THE PROVOST
When t2 met Irrfan Khan this July, he had revealed very little about his involvement with Inferno, except that he plays Harry Sims. Well, there’s no Harry Sims in the book but we now know that Sims is the enigmatic nameless man simply known as “the provost” in the book. Irrfan plays a key character in the plot, one who makes Zobrist’s madness possible and then switches sides to try and undo what he has unknowingly unleashed on the world.
When we were chatting with Irrfan, he had let it slip that director Ron Howard had initially offered him a smaller role (we suspect it was the provost’s trusted facilitator, Knowlton) but he wanted to play the provost and told him how he would play him. Howard was reportedly sold.
And now we can’t wait to see how Irrfan plays the man who has been described by Dan Brown as “a soulless mercenary, a facilitator of sin, the devil’s enabler....”
THAT VIDEO
There’s a scary video that Zobrist has made and wants the provost’s Consortium to release to the world media on a specific date. It’s a dramatic, spooky video no doubt, one that reveals the ground zero from where his plague will spread. But every time someone in the story views the video, Dan Brown describes it from scratch, so by the end of the book, you’ve really had enough of the sound of lapping water, the dark interiors of a cave, the eerie reddish light and the plaque with a date and a name. We just want to see it now!
Samhita Chakraborty
