Burn After Reading

Star Tom Hanks and director Ron Howard help F*** decode Inferno.

- Jedd Jong

Still, it’s hard not to gulp a tiny bit when Tom Hanks takes his seat next to this writer, nudging his notebook aside. Personal space is a valuable commodity, even if you’re Hollywood’s premier nice guy. Ron Howard joins Hanks at the table, sporting his signature baseball cap – today, he’s wearing one emblazoned with the logo of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), in which part of Angels & Demons was set.

Hanks and Howard are in Singapore as part of the Sony Summit to promote Inferno, the latest instalment in the Robert Langdon series of mystery thrillers. The chronology of the films visà-vis the books by Dan Brown is a mite confusing: The Da Vinci Code is the first film based on the second book, Angels & Demons is the second film based on the first book and Inferno is the third film based on the fourth book, with The Lost Symbol being skipped over.

Hanks reprises the part of Langdon, an esteemed Harvard professor who is the world’s foremost symbology expert. The film begins with Langdon awaking in a hospital in Florence, stricken with amnesia and pursued by assassins. Dr. Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones) helps Langdon escape, with Langdon and Brooks finding themselves pulled into a confounding quest orchestrated by Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster). The enigmatic scientist is intent on solving the world’s overpopulation crisis by unleashing an unstoppable virus, giving Langdon a chance to prevent the calamity by laying out a series of clues pointing to Inferno, the first part of Dante Alighieri’s 14th Century epic poem The Divine Comedy.