Posted on 05/22/2006 11:29:05 PM PDT by L.A.Justice
Some observers wonder why there’s been so much controversy regarding the movie version of THE DA VINCI CODE, but having finally seen the film I’m astonished that there’s so little.
This very long (2 and a half hours) and very somber exercise amounts to a full-frontal assault on Christianity, explicitly suggesting that the world would be a better place of Christian faith collapsed, and blaming the church (the supposedly deluded faith in “one true god”) for racism, intolerance, sexism, brutality and fanaticism.
In ideological terms, it’s a far more radical film than “The Last Temptation of Christ,” and even more deserving of public objection and condemnation. The argument that it’s just “fictional entertainment” falls apart in face of the movie’s gratuitous and inflammatory preachiness: director and co-producer Ron Howard could have offered an eerie, conspiratorial thriller without repeating the book’s outspoken indictments of Christian orthodoxy and shameless promotion of paganism. At the conclusion of the movie in particular, the lead characters (played by Tom Hanks and French Star Audrey Tautou) speculate on the liberating, peace-making, altogether beneficial impact on humanity if they someday succeed in rebutting the lies of authoritarian, traditional Christianity.
Could anyone feel sincere surprise at the indignant reaction by those of us who believe that today’s Christian faith represents a blessing rather than a curse to this troubled planet? By an large, the film follows the twists and turns of the book though one of the most engaging elements of the novel falls entirely flat on screen.
For readers, Dan Brown provides all sorts of tantalizing, fascinating, arcane historical and theological details -- many of them utterly bogus, of course-- that nonetheless come alive on the page. In the movie, much of this trivia coalescences into large, gooey, indigestible lumps of dialogue and exposition that not even a great actor like Sir Ian McKellen can put across.
As a matter of fact, all the considerable acting talent in the film is wasted, with superbly capable performers like Tom Hanks, Alfred Molina, Ian McKellen, Jean Reno and especially poor Paul Bettany (asked to play a murderous, self-torturing, albino monk) assigned to characterizations that remain pathetically underdeveloped, one dimensional, and feeble. We know, for instance, that Hanks’ Harvard “Professor of Religious Symbology” is a world famous academic star, but unlike the book there’s no hint as to whether he’s got a wife, or girlfriend, or boyfriend, or lovable sheepdog waiting for him back home in Cambridge. Again in contrast to the book, there’s no love scene between the two main characters and the presumably inevitable attraction between them never materializes in any sense.
The plot begins with a murder, of course: with a Louvre curator shot by a Catholic fanatic but left with enough time as he bleeds to death to arrange his nude body in a provocative style, while writing coded messages partly in his own blood, partly with invisible ink. Hanks and “police cryptographer” Tautou begin investigating the death (the victim, it turns out, is her grandfather) but the tough French detective (Jean Reno) assigned to the crime tries to arrest them before they get away. Eventually, they make their way to the lavish estate of a crippled scholar (McKellen) who reveals the connection between the rampage of violence in the “biggest cover-up in human history”: a Catholic attempt to suppress the knowledge that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, that she bore a child whose descendants live on in Europe to the present day, and that the keepers of this sacred secret will someday restore the true male-female balance to Western religiosity. McKellen also insists that Jesus was merely human, and that early Christians began persecuting pagans in ancient Rome, ruining the more enlightened, more sensitive world of the Empire.
The ominous visual style and generally energetic pacing keep the movie purring along, with less tedium than you’d expect in an epic of such conspicuous length. The plot twists and sudden reverses, however seem silly, arbitrary, and entirely contrived --- never growing organically out of the story-line or the thinly sketched characters.
As a piece of cinema, THE DA VINCI CODE is just barely competent enough to influence some gullible audience members to question the ancient story of the Gospels. If the movie represents the beginning of that questioning process, it could spark a religious awakening in some viewers, but director Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman (who did such wonderful work in last year’s superb “Cinderella Man”) offer smug, supercilious conclusions, not vital or vigorous challenges. RATED PG-13, for disturbing violence and gore, some (male) nudity, and fleeting sex references. TWO STARS.
It was given me by a friend two years ago. I laughed my butt off reading the so called "historical" footnotes. Honestly it's one of the most far fetched, poorly documented, tinfoil hat theories ever concocted. If you have read the history of the Gospels, and New Testament scholarship, including those dealing with writings that did not get chosen you know what a fraud Dan Brown's theory is.
It's akin to black helicoptors, or Reagan being part of the new world order conspiracy. And then writing a footnoted novel to prove it.
Dan Brown is trying to have it both ways......giving exhaustive footnotes that incite the ignorant to believe this fantasy. And when called on it, he then says.......heh, heh.....why it's only fiction.....
It's at best a B grade, third rate thriller. The only reason it sold so big was the NYT, Post and other book people pushed it because of it's so called "historical' proof that Christianity is wrong.
What theory?
Dan Brown wrote a work of fiction...what part of the word fiction do you not understand?
The theories that he built the story line on are not his.
There are no footnotes in Brown's book...you don't even know what you're talking about, do you?
Alas, it appears that he has instead repeated the dreadful quality of Batman & Robin and Lost In Space.
You're wrong.
There was a medieval monastic order known as the Priory of Sion, but according to all current information, it died out and all its assets were absorbed by the Jesuits (Society of Jesus) in 1617.
Have you seen the movie?
http://priory-of-sion.com/posd/posdebunking.html
Priory of Sion Debunked
"All ignorance is dangerous, and most errors must be dearly paid. And good luck must he have that carries unchastised an error in his head unto his death."
Arthur Schopenhauer.
The original Priory of Sion was founded in 1956 as a social group of friends by two people – André Bonhomme and Pierre Plantard. The outline of the story can be found here.
André Bonhomme definitely existed – I have spoken to him myself – as have many other researchers – and he has constantly confirmed that the original Priory of Sion had nothing to do with Bérenger Saunière, Rennes-le-Château, politics or secret societes – the story goes that one day, when someone commented on the bad state of the lodgings – it was decided to form a society devoted to the cause of Low-Cost Housing: and so the Priory of Sion was created! It was actually named after the hill of Mont Sion located outside the town of St-Julien-en-Genevoise. They produced an amateur journal called "Circuit" devoted to the cause of Low-Cost Housing, that simply comprised of A4 pages stapled together, and containing a crude text that was both stencilled and printed. The first issue can be found here.
Don't bother posting back, I won't look, nor answer. I can see you're not interested in anything but listening to yourself.
You're wrong, but then again, nothing that anyone can say will change your mind.
The Abbey (Priory) of Sion was a mediaeval monastic order which, according to a papal bull of the 12th century, had abbeys on Mount Sion in Jerusalem, on Mount Carmel, in Southern Italy (Calabria), and in France.
Check with The Vatican if you wish.
The Abbey (Priory) of Sion was absorbed by the Jesuits in 1617.
What land shark said. I don't care whether the Da Vinci code or the Catholic church is the fraud, or whether both are.
But I'll defer to historians who say as I've noted, people who aren't trying to make their religious beliefs history. Religious zealots make poor historians.
Browne says the theory on which his fiction is based is true. That is the utterance of a historian, not a novelist, and it is fair that he be subjected to the dialogue of the NT historians, into which he voluntarily injected himself.
What isn't fair, nor intellectually courageous, is to say one minute "it's all true" and then the next "it's fiction."
Which is what he's done.
"Even the concept of a Trinity, God in three natures, has always been repugnant to Jews examining Christ."
Exactly, but not to the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians or others.
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