This past week, I finally finished reading Inferno, the 3rd book in Dan Brown's series that follows Art History professor Robert Langdon and his adventures saving the world using clues from history: think Sherlock Holmes meeting a younger version of your 80 year old Art History professor. Inferno focuses on Langdon's venture through Florence searching for a virus that could wipe out the majority of the world's population, all while following clues that relate to Dante Alighieri's work of the same name. He teams up with Dr. Sienna Brooks, a young, blonde genius whose character is squashed in the movie adaptation. I could write a novel about all the problems I had with the movie- the cinematography and introduction of a useless love story for Langdon to name a few- but we don't have time for all that. My biggest problem in the movie was the adaptation of the character of Sienna Brooks.
Spoiler alert from this point on!
In the movie, Sienna is played by Rogue One's Felicity Jones. To me, Felicity Jones =/= Sienna Brooks. While reading, I'm not entirely sure who I imagined, but it definitely wasn't her. Her portrayal of Dr. Brooks, however, couldn't have been everything I imagined when the screenplay didn't allow for it. In the novel, Sienna Brooks has a 200+ IQ, read the entirety of Grey's Anatomy in a week when she was 10, and lived in hiding, undiscovered, for 10 days when she was a kid. In the movie, it doesn't seem like she has anything more than a college degree. She only seems to know what anyone would know- basic knowledge about Dante's Inferno and the sites that they search to find the secret location where the plague is being released. Brooks is the smartest, ingenious, and most complex character in any of Dan Brown's books by far, and her character was reduced to someone who was swept up by the ideas of a crazy geneticist and only ever wanted to complete his insane bidding.
The worst part about Sienna's character is her ending in the movie. We find out near the end of the novel that Sienna was in love with and working with Zobrist, the crazy geneticist/Dante fanatic who creates and unleashes the plague. After escaping Langdon and the probability of severe legal repercussions, she quickly turns around and says that she can't stop running from her problems anymore. She tells Langdon all about the plague, how she got involved with Zobrist, and why she felt so strongly about the masochistic 21st century version of the Black Death. She goes to Geneva and begins working with the World Health Organization to help reverse it. In the movie, she's not given a chance to try to make things right- she dies in a futile attempt to release the plague. (Also one of the worst changes- deciding not to release it in the movie- but that's another problem.)
In the novel, not so much in the movie, there's an extremely prominent theme of redemption. There are constant references to Dante's terror-inducing journey through hell and his ultimate destination, Paradise. Zobrist justifies his plague and the horrors that would follow by explaining that after Europe went through the Black Plague, there was the Renaissance; that you have to go through hell to get to heaven. The world saw terrors in the plague to then witness the greatest period for art and history during the Renaissance. This theme was paralleled directly in the character of Sienna. After going through her hell of a life- being raped, going bald from the resulting PTSD, and lifelong depression and loneliness- she finally is able to redeem herself. She finally finds her place and is no longer lonely when she joins brilliant scientists reverse the plague. Of all of the changes in the book, this is one I can't forgive. I was repelled by the fact that her whole character arc is wiped away in a Hollywood attempt to make her the bad guy.
I had so many problems with this movie adaptation, but I can't justify the careless whittling down of a smart, complex character who plays such a big role in the novel just to sell movie tickets.
