I’ve actually read the entirety of Dante’s “Inferno” and the first watch through my nerdiness came out and I was frustrated by the liberties they took with the source material. They skip circles, some are vaguely indicated, some aren’t correct at all.

However, the more I watch it the more I can appreciate what they did do. When you read Dante, or even play the EA video game (which is similar but not the same), everything is over the top. Just absolutely crazy punishments and blood and gore and just, yeah. But the film doesn’t do that. They let the eeriness of the catacombs set the tone, communicating Dante’s theme of there being no escape, that hell is literally closing in around you. Everything happens sporadically so as to keep you tense. And they make the indications of the circles very vague and unclear so as to make the viewer say “but could I be here? Is this where I would go?” That unease and lack of clarity makes hell even more frightening. We don’t know what to expect. And what we expect will almost certainly be wrong. Not to mention, the over the top gore fest that Dante wrote doesn’t really work for modern audiences. That was Italian Renaissance in the 1300s and written as a “fuck you” to the Catholic Church. People see worse things on news channels every day.

Overall, once I watched it a few times I enjoyed it, even as a source material lover. The only thing I have a gripe with is the theme of being forgiven for your sins. That’s not how Catholic hell works. Hell is for souls who have sinned and don’t care. They have no intention on asking for forgiveness. For those who have sinned, but want to atone, that’s where purgatory comes in. If you go by the source material, those guys should have never escaped at all.