From Bad to Worse....

Rating: 2/10 (21 May 2006)

Historians like myself cringe whenever Hollywood attempts to portray famous events and people from the past because we know Tinsel Town is going to foul it up. Usually it's the result of pandering to the intellectually challenged masses who care more for a cheesy love story or high octane special effects than substance and accuracy. Such is once again the case with The Da Vinci Code. Only this time the way was paved by a mine-numbingly painful book that had already succeeded where Hollywood often fails. Why? Most people are stupid. Most people think Leonardo's last name is Da Vinci (it's not). Most people believe anything they read in a trashy spy or mystery novel and don't bother to look up the facts for themselves. And with the very preface to the novel, Dan Brown informs his 40 million-plus readers that the art, architecture, documents and secret societies described in his book are FACT. Not fiction, mind you, but FACT. Oh sure, it's a fictional novel, we all know that. But so too are the "facts" Dan Brown hinges his entire story upon. FACT: The Priory of Scion didn't exist until 1956, and it was a fabricated society concocted by French hoaxster Pierre Plantard, who later confessed under oath that he lied about the Priory's long and storied past. That means Leonardo Da Vinci was NOT a member of the Priory of Scion, nor was Sir Issac Newton, nor was Alexander Pope. FACT: The Dossiere Secrets are a forgery, and were proved so by the 1970's. That means that Plantard and Co. simply invented the entire myth of the Merovingian Kings carrying the bloodline of Christ and Mary Magdalene, a bloodline they erroneously claimed still exists today. FACT: The Dead Sea Scrolls say ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about Jesus, contain no lost Gospels of Jesus, and in no way mention anything about Mary Magdalene.
All Dan Brown had to do was pick up a damn copy of them in translation from Barnes and Noble and he would have known that. Instead he got his idiot "art historian" wife to do the "research" for him. The same holds true with the Gnostic Gospels. Dan Brown claims they portray Jesus in human terms only and that's why they were rejected by the Church. That's CRAP. Again, Dan, pick up a copy of the Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels and read for yourself how they portray Jesus as even MORE Divine than in the 4 canonical gospels. The Gnostics believed Jesus was never even made flesh, that he was all spirit and that his followers should reject material things in favor of spiritual pursuits. All of this is ignored in the book and the film. Leigh Teabing's rant on Constantine was downright laughable. The Council of Nicea did NOT determine the books of the New Testament that are now canon; that didn't happen until 50 years later, by Athanasius of Alexandria. The issue at Nicea was NOT whether Jesus was mortal or divine, but whether the Arian view of Jesus being "of a similar substance" to God the father OR "of the same substance" was acceptable. The latter view was accepted, and that produced the Nicene Creed, which most brainwashed and ill-informed Catholics recite every Sunday like sheep thinking it's in one of the Gospels or epistles of Paul. It's not. It was written by Eusebius of Caesarea 300 years after the fact in an attempt to produce some unity of belief in a Christian network of followers who disagreed on anything and everything having to do with Jesus. Hence Catholicism was born: three centuries after Christ. But one thing they DID agree on (again obvious from the literature that has survived from the first 3 centuries AD), Jesus was at least somewhat divine, he never married and he never produced offspring. That nonsense was only the later mythologizing of an already problem-plagued, contradiction-riddled storyline presented in the Gospels. Oh, and try to find a secret chamber below Rosslyn Chapel, the supposed resting place of Mary Magdalene's sarcophagus. You won't. Many have already tried--with no success.
As a film-goer, I wanted to at least have a PLAUSIBLE conspiracy dangled before me. I know the Catholic Church is corrupt, I know the 4 Gospels are flawed and don't tell the whole story of a man who somehow got followers to believe he was divine. I know would-be Messiahs were a dime a dozen in the 1st century world of Roman Judea. I know that tens of thousands just as faithfully built temples and worshiped the likes of Hercules, the son of a mortal woman and a god, who performed great feats, suffered a horrible death and was resurrected by Zeus and taken up to Mt. Olympus as a god. Ho-hum. Nothing original there, Christianity. But for $9 bucks, I want Tom Hanks to actually act and not phone in a catatonic, 2-dimensional performance. I wanted the plot holes to be smaller than the Grand Canyon. I wanted a pretty Frenchwoman who could actually ACT. Thank god for Paul Bettany and Sir Ian McKellen. Leave it to the Brits to inject at least some infusion of spirit and emotion. But what was Ron Howard thinking? The film was overly-long, painfully shot (though the flashback sequences were mildly redeeming), and just plain excruciating at times. That dialogue between Langdon and Neveu often made me want to wretch, and there was about enough chemistry between them to make sulfur dioxide, and only that.
In short, I didn't hate The Da Vinci Code because I'm a devout Christian/Catholic (I'm not), or a devotee of the book (I'm absolutely not), but because I have half a brain and some taste for what constitutes good cinema. And this ars-dribble was an insult to both.