Spoiler Warning: I am going to give a synopsis and my opinions at the very end.
Summary:
Dante Alighieri, having returned from the Third Crusade, battles wolves, leopards, and lions in a dark forest. Fearing they may be after his fiancee, Beatrice, he races home to find everyone slain. A half-naked and dying Beatrice asks Dante if he was faithful to her, to which Dante confirms he was. Lucifer disagrees and drags Beatrice's soul to the gates of Hell.
After a bunch of hands stitch memories(?) onto his body, Virgil appears and claims that Lucifer made a bet with Beatrice over whether Dante would betray her for another. Virgil offers to guide Dante through Hell and the two board Charon, a living ferry that transports the souls of the dead to the First Circle of Hell.
Because the living are not allowed passage, demons are summoned to remove Dante from the vessel. He fights them off, kills Charon, and then steers the ship into the first circle, Limbo. In the circle designated for those who did not sin but lacked faith, Dante discovers that Beatrice was pregnant with his child (out of wedlock) and miscarried. Unbaptized babies attack, forcing the duo to retreat to a large building that houses the great rulers, philosophers, and thinkers, some of whom Dante has personally slain. He then battles King Minos, the judge tasked with sending condemned souls to their sin's corresponding circle of Hell.
They travel along the chains of Minos' platform to the island of Lust, the second circle, where a tempest forever rages and a fire always burns within the hearts of its inhabitants. Because Dante still refuses to admit to infidelity, Lucifer is forced to expose Dante's dishonesty by playing his memories for all to see. The memories show that Dante tortured prisoners and slept with the woman. He believed a bishop absolving him of all his sins excused these actions.
"Earth is another form of hell and humans are its demons." - Lucifer
Finally admitting to his wrongdoing, Dante and Virgil enter a grotto in the third circle where those who indulged in gluttony are consumed by the worm-like Cerberus. Dante allows himself to be devoured in order to reach the next circle. Inside the beast he encounters Ciacco, a man from his village whom he frees with his cross (this was a game mechanic that makes no sense in the context of the movie) and then destroys the hound's heart.
In the next circle Dante confronts his father, an abusive man obsessed with money. The pair trade blows, with the father having been promised a thousand years free of torture on the condition he kill his son. The father is shoved into a vat of liquid gold, allowing Dante to proceed to the fifth circle of hell, Wrath.
Dante experiences flashbacks to the Crusades, just after the granaries had been burned and their prisoners were left starving. Francesco Portinari (Beatrice's younger brother) insisted that they spare the heretics because their enemy, Saladin, had spared Christian lives the previous year. Dante refuses, believing their souls to have already been lost. As Dante and Virgil cross the River Styx, the soul of Filippo Argenti (a politician and rival to Dante) taunts them, only to be dragged down by the other wrathful spirits.
"Since when are heretics worth a Christian life?" -Dante
In the sixth circle of Hell, where heretics forever burn in fire, Dante meets and kills his rival Farinata by stabbing a cross through his eye. He then kills the minotaur that guards the gate to the seventh circle and gains access to the river where the violent boil in the blood they have shed. Virgil calls upon a friendly centaur, Nessus, to transport them to the other side of the Phlegethon river.
They pass through the Forest of Suicides, where Dante finds his mother growing from a fleshy tree. Believing she had died of a fever, he is dismayed to learn she hung herself in order to escape the physical violence of his father. Dante uses his cross again to free his mother.
Dante meets with his fellow Crusaders and learns there was never a holy war because God does not condone violence of any kind. They blame Dante's slaughter of the Saracen prisoners as the reason for their damnation and attack. Francesco Portinari (Beatrice's brother) in particular is angered that he was punished for Dante's actions.
The duo reach the point where the three great rivers of Hell meet and enter the realm of Fraud. Virgil parts ways with Dante, giving him time to reflect upon his sins. Lucifer reveals to Dante that the husband of the female prisoner he slept with, sought revenge by slaughtering Dante's household. He tried to sleep with Beatrice but was fought off, leading to her lethal injuries. Having lost her faith, Beatrice willingly weds Lucifer and becomes a demon. She declares Dante to be "the greatest fraud of all" and forces him to gaze into the ninth circle of Treachery, where he relives the moment Beatrice's brother took the fall for his actions.
Dante insists that he is remorseful over what he has done and returns his cross to Beatrice. Beatrice forgives him (rather easily), but to escape from Hell he will have to pass through the icy realm of Treachery to face Lucifer alone. During the battle, Dante accidentally frees Lucifer from his frozen prison, which Lucifer claims was part of his plan from the beginning; Beatrice was just the bait to get Dante down to the ninth circle of Hell. Realizing he cannot stop Lucifer, Dante begs for forgiveness and accepts his damnation. An explosive beam of light appears out of thin air, freezing Lucifer solid once more. Dante then dives into the chasm of Purgatory to be with Beatrice, claiming to have "neither died, nor lived."
"If you knew the true nature of God, you too would rebel." -Lucifer
Final Thoughts
As someone unfamiliar with the video game, I came away with mixed feelings. The backgrounds are very beautiful, each featuring such a strong visual identity that it is impossible for every Hellish design not to leave a lasting impression. I like that they tried to mix in some artistic flavor by using six different studios with distinct styles to give the viewer six different versions of Hell, but that kind of format is best suited to disparate collections of stories. Because Dante's Inferno follows a single narrative thread the switchup in styles is distracting and made the chapters feel disjointed from one another.The action heavy plot didn't allow for much in the way of character development either, and characters occasionally acted without any rhyme or reason to their actions, such as when Dante refuses to help the taunting soul but then is all too eager to save the soul in gluttony. He even left his child behind in limbo. I was never once convinced that Dante genuinely regretted anything he had done or that he had adequately redeemed himself for it; he came off as someone upset they got caught. The way Dante practically one-shot everything and never once tried to make amends with the people he harmed made the ending feel like a criminal getting away with his crimes. And when someone like Beatrice, who literally gave herself to Satan, can be forgiven just seconds later, I have to wonder what moral compass this world operates on.
The foundation for a good story is here but the implementation is too drawn out, too focused on the contrapassos of each circle instead of the main characters plight. I was also put-off by how often the single major female character was sexually assaulted, used as an object, and stripped naked for no good reason. I get that it's a story set in Hell and might be accurate to the game, but it pushed what I could personally tolerate. I am much more okay with this type of content when there is a good narrative reason for it as opposed to just being done for the sake of shock value or fetish. Given the level of violence, objectionable material, and likelihood of a casual viewer mistaking this for an adaptation of the poem instead of the video game, I am hesitant to recommend it, but fans of the game will likley enjoy it.
Have you seen Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic? What were your thoughts on the film? If you haven't seen it, do you plan to?
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