You know, I’m pretty sure others will cover the big plot holes, so I’ll just ask this:
Wouldn’t the sign over the door of the Vatican Archives just say, “ARCHIVES”?
Or “ARCHIVA”
Well, yeah, that. The point was that it seemed kind of pointless for the sign to say “VATICAN ARCHIVES” or “ARCHIVOS VATICANO” or whatever it said, considering that they’re hundreds of feet underground in The Vatican and all.
“Oh, Henry, isn’t exploring the Vatican fun?”
“Yes, dear. Look! Archives! I wonder who they could belong to?”
Something I wondered (herein a major spoiler of course):
Langdon and Vittoria Vetra (I had to look up the character name, she’s so well defined and all- beautiful actress though and at 40 actually a believable age for a physicist with some major cred in the field) spend all night chasing through catacombs and chapels and Roman backstreets and finally learn, after a confrontation with the world’s most gullible assassin, where the antimatter is and they get to it without time to defuse it and then Jr. Pope Ewan grabs it and up-up-and-aways it as part of his cunning plan.
Okay…
So what would have happened if Langdon or Vetra had been killed during the night? Or even if they’d just tumbled down a flight of stairs during a chase or just gotten hopelessly delayed in Rome traffic? It’s vital to the Camerlengo’s plan that he rescue the Vatican with the Papalchopper. Had Langdon and Vetra not solved the case and located the vial or not come back to the Vatican in time or just said "beats the shit out of me… terrorists need to learn to just say ‘the bomb’s in St. Peter’s tomb’ or whatever… what would the Camerlengo Ewan have done?
Would he have just been conferring with the Swiss Guard over the Sistine security measures and then suddenly said “Ohhh wait! I have a sudden hunch as to where the antimatter is! I’ll bet it’s right downstairs with The Lord’s own Fisherman himself! Be a dear and park The Vatchopper outside and leave it running, would you?!”, then dashed down, grabbed the antimatter, and dashed out claiming “Divine revelation!”? Because it’s essential he be a hero but it’s also essential that to do this the antimatter has to be located.
ETA: World’s most gullible assassin- He takes a huge amount of money to kidnap, detain, torture and kill four of the most important men in the Catholic world. When the final payment is wired he gets a text that “final payment’s wired, there’s a VW waiting for you at the Via Laverne de Fazio, keys inside” and says to himself “What a Prince of the Church among men, that’s just class to give me a new car too! Should I check it for bombs I wonder? Or just grab a scooter like Hannibal did in his escape from Florence and go off to enjoy my new ill gotten millions? Nah, that would show mistrust… and in spite of what I just explicitly told Forrest and the Physicist about people brutally murdering others in the name of God, I’m going to trust this guy who paid me to horribly off several Cardinals and would be forever destroyed if I was ever link to him by cranking that VW, because trust… it’s got to begin somewhere.”
IIRC, in the book he says he had planned to “go ask Saint Peter for guidance” or some shit, not believing that Langdon would figure it out.
No intention of seeing the movie, but the biggest plot hole in the book for me was:
- There is a bomb in the Vatican.
- We know there is a bomb in the Vatican because a camera is pointed at a superfluous digital readout on the bomb.
- We know the camera is reading the digital readout because it is broadcasting its video signal
- We know it is broadcasting the signal because we are receiving the image of the digital readout.
- BUT WE CAN’T FIND THE CAMERA BROADCASTING THE SIGNAL WHICH WE CAN RECEIVE!
It would be trivially easy to triangulate the signal.
Yeah. I like them too. Problem is, I never know it’s bad. Folks have to tell me it’s bad, then, I’m like, “oh.”
This movie, I loved. I also loved the book and the movie “Da Vinci Code”, and didn’t know it was bad, 'till everyone told me.
Loved this movie, even though I was lost half the time. At some points, I was yearning for subtitles, and it wasn’t just the times they were speaking latin.
That said, even* I* could figure out the bad guy after that scene were they bust in and think they catch Stellan leaning over Ewan. That scene was subtle like a bullet to the head.
How about the fact that the ambigram brands of the four elements (that were supposedly created centuries ago, right?), are in English, instead of Latin or Italian?
Didn’t the original threat message say that the four cardinals would be killed publicly? And yet the first one is only barely found in time in the basement of an obscure church under a fancy painted manhole cover that Langdon happens to notice is slightly askew.
And how did they manage to pry that thing up, without any kind of tool, when it was set perfectly flush in the floor?
Langdon and Vetra are in the archives with only a few hours before the Vatican will be destroyed, and they feel they have time to tell each other lots of details of Galileo’s life that they both know (but that the audience apparently needs to know), that have nothing to do with what they’re trying to find out. But a few minutes later, Vetra feels compelled to desecrate a priceless artifact rather than copy down four lines of verse because “there’s no time.”
Later Langdon and the blond German Swiss Guard are in another large (but hermetically sealed) archive room when the power goes off and the ventilation cuts out. They start to pass out from oxygen deprivation in about five minutes? Hell, when Hanks was in the Apollo 13 spacecraft with two other guys, they had several hours before the CO[sub]2[/sub] levels became dangerously high.
How about all the exterior scenes around Rome that are supposed to take place between 7 and 8 p.m. with bright overhead sunlight that’s clearly close to noon? And then night falls and it’s completely dark in about five minutes?
And then there’s the talkative (and gullible) villain who, after ruthlessly dispatching dozens of policemen and others with robot-like precision, gets our hero and heroine in his clutches only to let them go because “I haven’t been paid to kill you. And don’t chase after me,” or you’ll be killed in the exploding car I’m dumb enough to get into. (BTW, who built that car bomb for Father Ewan? And how did he kill the guy who did that? And who killed that guy, and who…)
A portable anti-matter thermos that runs on batteries?
I’m pretty sure that Johnny L.A. or some other helicopter pilot could tell us about the implausibility of bailing out of a chopper and expecting it to continue to climb straight up.
And BTW, nuclear weapons are detonated well above ground level to maximize blast damage. Flying due west toward the sea, at relatively low level, would have been a much better strategy to limit death and destruction than a vertical climb.
Hell, we’ve only scratched the surface of the stupidity of this movie.
That’s explained in the movie- the Illuminati communicated with each other in English because it’s a mongrel language, unfettered by the influence of the Church, or somesuch.
It’s not entirely implausible, although AFAIK all scholarly texts were published in Latin more or less until the 19th century. What is implausible is the idea of Gallileo publishing a text with English writing in it, since he didn’t speak English.
The oxygen levels in the archive chambers are kept artificially low to prevent oxidation or something.
I spent most of the movie wondering if scientists at the control room in CERN really wear lab-coats.
Ah, I missed that. Makes perfect sense. :rolleyes:
Good point.
Yes, they made a point of explaining that, but they’re doing fine while the ventilation is on. But as soon as it stops, they start gasping? If the O[sub]2[/sub] levels were fine a minute ago, turning *off *the fans won’t suck the rest of the oxygen out of the room in minutes, nor will their running around trying to break the glass.
In any case, if the archives is so damn high-tech, wouldn’t they have an uninterruptible power supply to prevent damage in the case of a power outage? Or a fail-safe emergency exit system to prevent people from getting trapped inside these death chambers?
The whole high-tech archives business was just a ludicrous plot device to manufacture another nonsensical threat.
The whole premise of the story is a ludicrous plot device used to manufacture a nonsensical threat. 
Oh, yeah. I forgot!
Well, the Swiss guard was a smoker. (Another bit of ridiculousness, I thought; yeah, he’s a smoker, but he also looks to be about 25 and in good physical shape so I doubt that the cigarettes have weakened his lungs quite that much by this time of his life.)
The fact that the archives are a vacuum and that the people have to gasp for a second just when they enter is another great “I wonder if that will be relevant?” comment in the movie.
Also, I would think that a vacuum locked room would have an emergency exit. It’s not like the purpose of the vacuum lock is to kill unauthorized users (or… is it?) and it’s unlikely the archival stacks would decide to open the door for some fresh air, and it would seem that when installed someone would think “it could be bad if somebody was stuck in here in a power outtage- like, you know, if there was antimatter somewhere and they wanted to cut off the power to find out where it was and stuff”. I guess even the Vatican has to go with the lowest bid though. (I’m guessing the Archives were built with the money they got when Michael Corleone bailed out the Vatican Bank.)
The wiki article says that in the book the Camerlego (McGregor’s character) is Italian and the biological son of the recently offed Pope through artificial insemination. I’ve no idea why this was dropped from the movie, because I don’t think Opie’s Day crew would have decided it was too loopy based on what they included nor do I think they were concerned with offending Catholics.
My guess is that they plan to recycle it for the sequel, which will be Da Vinci Code meets Angels & Demons. In that you find out the new Pope, who took the name Luke because he was a physician once, is the artificially begotten son of Jacques Sonnier (this revealed when they find out he also peed another message to Robert Langdon as he lay dying) so that he could make sure a descendant of Christ was the leader of the church. It will be revealed when His Holiness finds a Beta Max video of Sonnier hidden in a compartment under the right breast of Michelangelo’s Night in which Sonnier says to the new Pope that the plan worked perfectly and “Luke, I am your father”.
Unfortunately no sooner will this happen than the Pope will pull off his latex mask and reveal that he is in fact Old Mr. Heidelbaum the zealously anti-Catholic/anti-rock music/anti-meddling kids Lutheran crank who only became Pope so he could sell off the church properties in Minnesota to developers and finally have peace from the Sisters of Mercy Bingo hall at the edge of his run down amusement park. This will of course be called THE WOEBEGONE CODE.
Well, I’ve read enough to know I’ll just wait until the History Channel documentary explaining how all these things might be true (and throwing in Nostradamus, of course).
Or is that Throwing up Nostradamus? Either way works for the HC.
If you could devise a show that incorporates Nostradamus, ice road trucking, prison gangs, Dan Brown books, and comic book style graphics then you could sell it to History Channel and make a mint.
An Alaskan truck driver realizes that he’s the re-incarnation of Nostradamus when he accurately predicts the prison break-out of a Neo-Nazi gang that wants to locate a secret arctic cloning laboratory built during WWII, storing the genetic material of Adolf Hitler. The truck driver must race against time in his big rig before the prison gang (disguised as crab fisherman) can activate the lab and clone themselves a Fourth Reich. The twist? The prison gang leader is, himself, the re-incarnation of Adolf Hitler!
A co-production of the History Channel and the Discovery Channel.
Story by Dan Brown. Art Direction by Rob Liefeld.
The History Channel’s Behind the Da Vinci Code special went further than that- it asserted that the Priory of Sion really existed during the medieval period, but wasn’t connected to the Templars.
This, of course, isn’t true- it was a hoax thought up by some French guys in the 20th century.
You forgot to throw in a drunk logger violating every OSHA rule in the book. Ala Axe Men.