Professor Langdon Saves The Vatican From Itself

Rating: 7/10 (12 April 2010)

As one who appreciates the use of irony, I have to admit that it was the use of irony that really made this movie work for me. Where the original story in the series - "The Da Vinci Code" (which I thought it was taken far too seriously by too many of my fellow Christians) - came across as more of a deliberate attempt to call religion itself and especially the Catholic Church into question, this takes a much broader approach to the question of religion. It makes sure that some of the evils of religion are portrayed, but at the same time it's made clear that these are the evils of men rather than evils by which to judge either God or faith.
The basis of the story is the so-called "God particle," and deals with the attempts of scientists to recreate the moment of creation. Having succeeded in that, what results is a particle of immense destructive power which is somehow seized by the "Illuminati" - a somewhat shady historical society which in this movie is portrayed as a quasi-terrorist organization acting against the Roman Catholic Church - and is used as a threat to blow up the Vatican during a conclave to select a new pope. This becomes a sort of Vatican cloak and dagger movie. Four cardinals are kidnapped by this group, who leave clues as to what will happen, and we discover early on that there's a limited amount of time before the bomb blows up, so in some ways this becomes a stereotypical (but well done) countdown movie, where you're pretty sure everything will work out in the end, but you're not sure how you'll get there. To unravel the puzzle, the Vatican (somewhat unconvincingly, given his history) calls upon the "religious symbologist" Robert Langdon (again played by Tom Hanks.) You can't really be sure who's on what side until the very end of the movie, and some of the twists that take place as the movie nears its end took me completely by surprise. I thought I had the whole thing figured out with an hour to go, but I didn't, so that was quite effective.
Things perhaps got a wee bit silly from the point of the parachuting priest onward, but it was decent fun, and I did appreciate the irony of Langdon becoming the one whom Cardinal Strauss concedes (over Langdon's objections) was called by God to save the church essentially from itself. I also liked Strauss's line "religion is flawed because man is flawed," which seems to sum things up quite nicely. Overall, I liked this more than "The Da Vinci Code," perhaps because, minus the controversy of the earlier novel/movie, I could appreciate this more on its own merits.