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In this corner: the Book. A collection of words that represent ideas when filtered through the lexical systems in a human brain. From clay tablets to bound collections of wood pulp to units of stored data, the book has been around in one format or another for some 3,800 years.

And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.

Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Film.

Angels & Demons

In 2003, failed pop singer Dan Brown's fourth novel hit the top of the New York Times Best Seller list. One year later, Brown's earlier books became best sellers as well. His fourth novel, The Da Vinci Code, is generally recognized as one of the most popular books to come out of the current decade. In 2003, Sony Pictures acquired the film rights to the novel along with the rights to Angels & Demons - a similar book featuring the same central character. The film rights to Angels & Demons would have been mere trivia had the film adaptation of The Da Vinci Code not been the huge success it's become. Having grossed well over $750 million worldwide, The Da Vinci Code is one of the top 30 highest grossing films of all time. Based on the novel that came before it, The Da Vinci Code's sequel opened over the weekend, looking to add to that success.

The Book

Angels & Demons is a suspense thriller focusing on the exploits of Harvard Symbology Professor Robert Langdon. Langdon is contacted to investigate a murder and quickly finds himself caught up in a conspiracy against the Catholic church evidently instigated by the mysterious Bavarian Illuminati.

Though firmly planted in a contemporary millennial world complete with Madonna, a Mickey Mouse watch, Steve Jackson Games and numerous other details specific to the world in which we live, Brown makes a concerted effort early on to let the reader know that his novel is a work of fiction. In addition to the usual disclaimer that is found in the front of most works of fiction, Brown includes an Author's Note that identifies the few bits of the novel that are factual - evidently implying that the rest of the novel is a blurring of our world into a darker, more suspenseful fictitious world.

Brown's Angels & Demons exists in a strange place vaguely out of phase with our own - one where Symbology is a respected academic discipline taught at Harvard rather than a fuzzy word with a lot of different meanings. It's a world where antimatter is a viable and dangerous source of nearly limitless energy rather than an impractical scientific curiosity. It's a world where a portable camera is capable of sending a signal strong enough to penetrate from deep underground, yet somehow still manage to be completely untraceable by trained technicians without shutting down huge power grids. It's a world where cell phones have dial tones. It's a world where academics seem to have a deep need to speak in simple, expository language that would be handy to advancing a plot without getting bogged down in all those pesky little details that make academic pursuits so interesting in the first place. Indeed, it's a world that seems to be harrowingly bent around a plot with such force as to seem like a very, very uncomfortable place to swim around in for 480 pages. As a result, the characters don't come across as being people so much as plot elements. This is particularly disconcerting as it relates to the main characters, whose lack of depth make it very difficult to care about them.

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