Dante's (Fairy Tales) Inferno

I finally tasted the adaptation of the famous Dante's Inferno. I was always amazed by the historical facts and how Dante wove them into nice tortures and torments (Gee, I might be crazy and psycho for saying this out loud). Divine Comedy is the book that made me spend lots of money only to copy it from the library.

When I found that EA Games decided to make a game adaptation of this classic, I was so hyped. 'Twas not until the release that I was disappointed. They chose PS3 and X360, which means I could not play it. I already gave up when I found the trailer of Dante's Inferno : An Animated Epic. Looking from the artwork, I knew that it is a cinematic alternation of the game. At least, Inferno came alive in an accessible media.

After spending some minutes of downloading the rip (yeah, thanks to the high speed internet!!), I began to watch it. The animation was crisp, bleak coloured, somber and grim. The first scene when Dante was wandering in a dark forest with the appearance of panther and wolf resonated with the first part of the composition. But it was an extended prologue of the original. Right after the dark wood, Dante found Beatrice lying with her last breath. Okay, this might be an introduction for people who are not familiar with the epoch. But something went wrong. As Beatrice breathed her last and turned into a spirit, Lucifer came and hold unto her soul.

My memory was hazy for a moment. Is there a scene of this? And it went clearer, that the producer did something in the adaptation effort. They put a fairy-tale like background, fitting everything into stereotype. Dante himself is portrayed as a knight coming from the Holy War. Well, he is a Templar. Meanwhile, Beatrice was changed into a Damsel in Distress, a princess waiting to be saved by the handsome prince.

It's weird, isn't it? In the original plot, Beatrice is the one who saves Dante from the darkness of his soul. Even more, she helps Dante getting through the journey. Is this a market demand to fit this philosophical tale into a fairy tale framework? Into the hegemony of a man, where woman is perceived as weak character to be saved? Interesting case, for in the 21st century like this, hegemonic masculinity still exist within the media and culture, in its subtlest possible way.

Dante himself is not a pure translation of the original Dante Alighieri. Even the fact that he had a pre-marital intercourse with Beatrice, a pure soul, reminded me of Faust. This resemblance is clearly nailed with the scene in which Dante found his unborn son in Limbo, the first circle of hell. Pre-marital intercourse with a pure soul, unborn child from the flawless virgin, this is clearly a mixture of two different classics. The producer might add this fact to spice up the plot, but it resulted in a different Inferno.

The distinction of good and evil is also very clear here. All demons in hell are evil, thus they have to be killed. Therefore, there are scenes in which Dante slain Charon and Minos. He even slaughtered the demon. Well, it is an important point in the game, but do they have to include the slaying here? They must be boss characters in the game...

The modification of the original also ignored the mythological references to certain characters. When Dante and Virgil have to mount Nessus to cross the river, I was very shocked. Nessus is portrayed as a sexualized female centaur with a bare chest and boobs. WHA? Nessus is supposed to be a male and lustful centaur who kidnapped Deianera in Heracles opus. If Nessus is a female, then she would never kidnap Deianera, thus never give Deianera the poisonous robe that killed Heracles.

Geee, I mumbled too much about this. This movie is not that bad, anyway. If you know nothing about Divine Comedy, this is a nice one (but you have to ignore different styles of animation throughout the movies, which can be pretty annoying). But for people who understand Divine Comedy, this is a completely new story. They only have the same name and concept. This is, once again, a fairy tale version of Divine Comedy.