This stylistic cover deceives the audience; the movie’s not this interesting.

Movies, as forms of entertainment, should entertain. Unfortunately, Tom Hanks’ new movie Inferno was thoroughly un-entertaining.

Inferno is directed by Ron Howard who has teamed up with Hanks to make some great movies, including Splash and Apollo 13. More recently, they worked to bring Dan Brown’s novels to the silver screen: The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, and now, Inferno. They should have stopped while they were ahead because this movie’s three major flaws detracted from its enjoyment.

The movie starts with Hanks’ character, Robert Langdon, a Harvard art historian in a hospital bed, and here begins the first way the movie annoys the audience. Hanks has a concussion, and the director thought it would be clever to make the audience experience it first hand with blurry, jumpy camera work, quick flash-backs to grotesque scenes, and ear-splitting high-pitched squeals. This is no way to start a movie unless you’re trying to get the audience to leave. Unfortunately, this reviewer had to stay through the end.

After about 15 minutes of annoying concussion scenes, the movie continued with Langdon galavanting around Europe looking for clues to find a deadly virus left by a crazy billionaire who thinks the earth has too many people (more on this later). This part of the movie, where Langdon searches for clues in old paintings with his new friend, Sienna, is okay, but we’ve seen it before in The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons. It barely holds our attention, but at least it was semi-believable.

The ridiculous ending is the second way the movie annoys viewers. Without giving away any spoilers, the ending conflict is contrived, overly complicated, and makes no sense. In many movies, it is possible to enjoy a convoluted ending while it’s happening because you don’t have time to realize that things don’t make sense. But in Inferno, the ending is so dumb you can’t help realizing it at each complicated and unrealistic step.

Now these two errors could possibly be forgiven if it wasn’t for the third: the entire premise of the movie. The villain, who we are supposed to believe is doing something terrible for just reasons, somehow still believes the scare from the 1970s about overpopulation. The idea was that the human population was expanding too much and that we would soon run out of natural resources leading to mass starvation and global poverty. In 1970, when there were less than 4 billion people, the prediction was that most of us would be starving or dead by the year 2000.

Currently, we have 7 billion people on the planet and the number of people starving has been falling since 1970.  The population bomb scare has shown to be false by actual events, but this movie pretends we’re living in some alternate universe. It pretends that advances in science, technology, engineering and math haven’t dramatically increased farming and energy production. These advances have allowed us to live better even though there are more people on the planet.

Inferno, the latest from actor Tom Hanks and director Ron Howard, is, unfortunately, more annoying than entertaining. Do yourself a favor and see Apollo 13 or even Splash instead of this infernal movie.