The grail is what again? and it's . . . where?

Rating: Null/10 (24 May 2006)

This is one of those films that you don't know to ask for your money back until it's mostly over. Only then do you realize the full scope of how brainless it all was, and how you were cheated.
Tom Hanks is interesting in the part, though dull. The casting seems otherwise good. The French do suggest a little unintentional comedy. But maybe that's just a French thing.
There are those I've heard say - gee, it really makes you think. And they'll turn around two minutes later and say - just fiction and whatchya complain-an about, it's just a movie? So, until such folk get their heads in working order, I'll just suggest that the plot is insane. The tomb of Magdelene is supposed to be buried in the little pyramid under the glass pyramid fairly recently built in the courtyard of the Louvre Museum. And the Tom Hanks character doesn't want to upset 'organized religion' by telling anyone, I suppose. So that's why they built that ugly glass pyramid (as bad guy #1 called it). Had to be a reason. Of course, the real whopper is not that there is this line of offspring, which just coincidentally, we'll say, happens to end with a girl - because imagine how the plot would look if it were a guy - from Jesus Christ. It's that Jesus Christ was just a man, just a prophet. There's a number of sects that believe that, like the Freemasons, and the Muslims, and any number of heretics in the Church's past. Jesus was just some good guy - who literally claimed to be God, Himself. So he was just a good guy, who was completely out of his mind. He was great teacher of morality, who fornicated with Magdalene, or then secretly married her to make it all legal. And then there are Catholics, and Protestants and Greek Orthodox who obviously believe otherwise.
As with pretty much the same supposed conspiracy said to be concealed by thousands and thousands over the millenia as proposed by Kazantzakis, also made into a film, and the same as with Lincoln's original Holy Blood myth from which Brown's fiction is wholly lifted, despite what a court may have ruled, what's sort of sad when watching this is not that the film just seems to drag on and on, it's not that the camera occasionally bounces all around, or that it screens like a book when they first elude capture, etc., but that people actually spend their lives coming up with these kind of conspiracy theories. To imagine that this described the early Church, the Apostles and disciples who literally were tortured and martyred, that of course is the classic argument against this, or similar notions.
As for the Priority of Sion stuff, this group of four that is murdered by McKellen who are trying to protect the female descendant, and the supposed 'grail', which in this myth isn't the cup at Valencia Cathedral, but the corpse of St. Mary Magdalene, this 'Priory' was admitted to be a hoax perpetrated in recent decades by a couple of guys, a con-man named, Pierre Plantard, and his buddy, Philippe de Cherisey. As for the Opus Dei involvement in the plot, that may come closest to the truth. The cult is not necessarily orthodox, and has been otherwise seen as heterodox, but it seems even more just to be a group which is very opportunistic, and really just out for itself, and power. It's a shadowy group, no question. It's considered dangerous by many traditional 'religious' Catholics. Whether any Opusites wear monk costumes is another thing, as is whether it's just a group of psychotic assassins, as Brown would have it.
If one wants a real conspiracy, a real threat to Catholicism, it's been in the news and in front of everyone - since at least the mid-1960s. It's the changes made in virtually everything, and blamed on Vatican II by the very 'reformers' themselves. There's a line that one of the bad guys, played by McKellen, says, or keeps saying. People ignore what's right in front of them. But what people see, and don't want to see, is this 'reformist' destruction on the inside (not necessarily including altering the appearance of Da Vinci's Last Supper), and which extends to the Protestant denominations, as well, and all the while the anti-Church conspiratist nuts keep pounding away with Holy Blood myths, and Gnostic gospels. That's the danger. It's 'world church reform'. Watering down. There's your threat, not in the deep desire of Kazantzakis and others that Jesus Christ be some sort of guy who can't keep his pants on. Such notions are so ridiculous, and so trivial in the face of the real threat, and what's really going on. In fact, one wouldn't be surprised with the desire of these newChurchers, who speak like secular feminists in everything, to believe that St. Magdalene wasn't really a Saint, but was rather the Incarnation, herself. Considering how far gone they are, already, that would just be one more against them on the list of offenses to both God, and The Church which He founded. If that's what 'making one think' is what anyone means who says it, hopefully it will.
Now, if Ron Howard ever made a film about the life of a Catholic Saint, that might be a sure sign that one could use ice skates in hell. But he'd probably go Oliver Stone one better and have the Saint dream of 'sexing' Jesus while discovering that The Church has been concealing the 'truth' that Pius X was a ten year old girl, name John - Joan. abbr. in Latin - who had good make-up people to make her appear old. Dakota Fanning as the Pope. Teen Pope. Coming soon. After all - it's just a movie!