Comment on Conclave was almost a great movie, but failed to stick the landing
Microw@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Iirc this is pretty realistic. After a certain number of voting rounds cardinals often agree to switch to a different candidate, with such candidate who suddenly comes up as a new option taking a huge jump in votes for him.
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And given when the book was written - on the height of Daesh/ISIS bombings in Europe - the fact that a jihadist group would bomb the Vatican during Conclave makes way more sense than if it was a white supremacist group. The fact that the last twist isn’t properly influencing anything is, I believe, also down to the fact that it is simply adapted from the book.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 1 week ago
Re the context of when the book was written…I didn’t actually know it was based on a book, as I watched it. I did already know that as I wrote this review, but that was too late to shape my original interpretation of the film as I watched it.
Plus, I don’t really love it as an excuse. There are two possibilities as I see it. Either it worked in the book but didn’t translate well to screen, in which case they should have made the necessary changes to come up with something that did work. Or it didn’t work in the book and they should have taken the opportunity of the adaptation to improve upon it. It wouldn’t be the first time an adaptation significantly changed the source material.
Microw@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I’d agree that it seems unnecessarily overdramatic in the movie plus due to the fact that we are closed in with the cardinals, we don’t see how this attack was possible nor the police investigations that follow it. So we are left with an incomplete picture and the cardinals’ reactions to that.
Ilandar@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I don’t think that aspect of the film is actually relevant to the central themes or story, though.
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The terrorist attack is more of a plot device to break the isolation of the Conclave, and thus to bring the cardinals back from the temptation of power and to remind them of the greater world and the people they are ultimately in service to, as well as to setup the final confrontation between Tedesco and Benitez.
Microw@lemm.ee 1 week ago
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Yeah its definitely a plot device for that