Dante's Inferno

It was a good modern take on "Inferno" and delivered well. Often movies of Inferno are tedious, but this kept me interested without straying from the text too much. You've got a Dante walking around in a hoodie in a big city through the levels of hell. He and Virgil meander through airport security, strip malls and less desirable parts of a modern city. The punished souls of presidents, politicians, popes and pop-culture icons are sentenced to eternal suffering of the most unusual kind. The two dimensional paper characters tell the story in a simplistic yet imaginative way. The artistry matches the level of entertainment in the storyline.

I am disappointed that I cannot find it for sale or anywhere to stream.

I had been flipping through the channels and I saw a preview for this movie and I thought it looked very interesting so I watched it and fell in love with it. I went out and bought the modern version of the book. I loved the art work in the book and being an artist myself I decided to draw a few pieces based on the art in the book. I latter went back to watch the movie again and found that almost all of the sets (backgrounds) were almost identical to the artwork in the book and the banter between Dante and Virgil was about the same also (although the movie is MUCH more humorous) I think it's a great modern spin on the old classic.

Having read the Inferno of Dante's works, it can become a bit stale with all of the adaptations and re-adaptations. The video game based on the works was okay but limited only to the horror/action genre that it had set itself up to be. I find this take on the classic to be NOT watered down, but a modern interpretation that a layman can view and perhaps be inspired to look more into it.

All of the snobs that say that it's dumbed down apparently don't realize that very old classic literature--especially ones with heavy religious themes--don't click with everyone and can appear on the surface as holier-than-thou to a modern reader. With this film the basics of not only the horrors of Hell and Dante's enduring love for Beatrice (which would probably seem obsessive and maudlin for today's audience) are presented in a digestible way. I was already acquainted with the Circles of Hell even before watching this film, but making parallels and connections to what I knew and the "updated" version of it proved to be just as entertaining as if I came knowing little about the source material.

If you haven't read Dante's INFERNO (part 1 of THE DIVINE COMEDY), you should. And once you have, you should check on this delightfully innovative spin on that classic tale.

This isn't the INFERNO as Dante wrote it. Dante has been completely modernized; Hell resembles Los Angeles, the punishments aren't quite what you remember, and the people populating Hell are now familiar faces (Ronald Reagan, Strom Thurmond, Condoleeza Rice). There's also a good dose of Monty Python and Mike Judge in the black humor that drenches every scene.

And while the take has its own novelty, what really elevates the film from good to great is the consistently enjoyable animation. The use of hand-operated paper cut-out puppets is wonderful. The care that has gone into crafting the sets and characters themselves is quite impressive indeed.

Highly recommended.

Yes, this is a puppet show. Yes, the puppets are kind of cheesy, hand-drawn paper animated with visible sticks. You know what? It fits. The art design is really interesting. Seeing Hell represented as an allegory of a crowded urban city is very interesting. They do a very good job of mapping (mostly) outdated "sins" to modern ones. If you liked the original poem, or even better Larry Niven and Jerry Pournell's novel "Inferno" than you'll enjoy this movie. To those that say it mocks Dante's beliefs, well, most of the people he populated hell with were political enemies, either contemporaneous or historical, and in those terms the source material could be seen as less about his vision of the afterlife and more a book of schadenfreude celebrating his enemies downfall. Funny how his allies with similar flaws as his enemies mostly wound up in Purgatory. I hope they consider making both Purgatorio and Paradiso.