When I first heard that EA was adapting Dante’s Inferno into a videogame, I knew there was going to be trouble. If the game had been, say, an adventure game or some other endeavor that required at least a little thought, I might be a little more sympathetic. But the development team had something a little cruder in mind.
Basically, they took the idea of Dante—the poet forced to wander with Virgil through the nine levels of Hell and whose most aggressive response to the horrors he witnessed in Hell was to shed tears and wish them eternal torment—and remade him as a blood-soaked warrior of the crusades, dripping with the guilt of some pretty outlandish sins.
Naturally, the anime film release in conjunction with the Inferno game follows suit, taking an Animatrix¬-style multi-director look at Dante’s trip through Hell in various art styles (which, by the way, makes for pretty inconsistent viewing). As you might imagine, very little of Alighieri’s original poem remains within the slash-first, ask-questions-later approach the film takes.
Dante himself, aside from being a warrior rather than a poet (“Can you believe that in my youth I wanted to be a poet? But I all I ever knew was violence!” Dante laments to Virgil at one point) has got a seriously fucked-up case of PTSD, after committing adultery and meaningless bloodshed during his time fighting in the holy wars.
He’s not a very likeable character for almost all of the film’s 88-minute running time. I mean, for Christ’s sake, the man mercilessly slaughters an entire cell full of heretic captives because he’s tired of being on guard duty. Unlike the temperance, and, I don’t know, intelligenc, Alighieri gave his persona in the original poem, this Dante is entirely corruptible and an idiot.
God knows why he would want to sleep with common whores when the blonde bombshell Beatrice is waiting for him back home in Florence, either, particularly since he seems just as likely to kill or release any heretic prisoner he’s supposed to be guarding. But that’s hardly the most offensive thing about this slapdash adaptation of Inferno.
Beatrice, as it turns out, is the reason that Dante is rushing to Hell in the first place. Yep, you guessed it—she’s a damsel in distress, and she bargained her soul with Lucifer, apparently, in order to ensure Dante’s safe return home from the Crusades.
The liberties don’t stop there. As if it weren’t enough to turn Inferno into a goddamn love story, Dante finds his parents in the depths of Hell as well. During his brief time in the fourth circle (Greed), Dante confronts his father, a fat, hulking monster with fish gills that has also made a bargain with Lucifer (what is with Dante’s family making deals with the devil?). His mother committed suicide.
Up until this point in the film I was borderline entertained, if a bit annoyed with Dante’s penchant for melodrama. But when it was revealed the Dante’s father was a gluttonous, abusive man who beat the shit out of his wife because he suspected her of stealing a few lousy gold coins from him, I kind of abandoned all of whatever hope I had yet remaining.
And for someone that’s suffering so much guilt, Dante is able to commit patricide pretty easily. And later he stabs someone in the eye with a cross just because they’re mocking him. Violence is usually Dante’s modus operandi, actually. When Charon denies him passage, Dante’s reply is to roar with rage and tear through Charon’s skull with a scythe.
The violence as depicted in the original poem is oddly uneven, however. There are plenty of graphic scenes (gotta love a good vaginal impaling) but a lot of the more poetic—and gruesome—devices of eternal torture Alighieri dreamt up are strangely absent.
I guess it’s hard not to expect that a lot of the details of Hell are glossed over when you’ve only got an hour and a half to thunder through all nine circles, fight Lucifer and call it a day, but isn’t Hell what the Inferno is all about? As it stands, most circles of Hell get between seven and 10 minutes of exposure each.
Aside from that, the animation styles vary wildly and jarringly change without much warning. Some of the styles are far prettier than others, and the principal characters’ looks can differ pretty significantly. I wish they would’ve just picked a style and stuck with it, as was the case with EA’s Dead Space anime tie-in, Downfall.
There’s a few decent parts about this animated Inferno: the story, as much as it is a rape and pillage job of the original literary source material, is told with a surprisingly decent amount of exposition, and the voice work is generally pretty well done, in that European fantasy epic, almost-Middle-English-but-not-quite sort of way.
If you’re looking for a crass defilement of Dante’s Inferno, I’d say skip the movie and just play the game (as far as God of War clones go, it’s at least well done). If you’re looking for something with a little more substance, however, just do yourself a favor and read the goddamn book.