And UFOs and ghosts. Or Ghost UFOs! Maybe they provided the cloning technology. (It would have to involve anal probes, of course.)
And alleged monsters.
Both iDa Vinci Code and Angels & Demons were masterpieces compared to Digital Fortress - the book with 3-fingered encryption developer Ensei Tankado, who used a mysterious partner named NDAKOTA to sell the mysterious encrypted password to his company’s software.
Re-read that three times, and the odds are excellent you have solved both mysteries. Congratulations.
Something to do with the Seine River valley?
What kills me is that if I were wanting to hold someone for ransom or commit a terrorist act or pass on coded information I’d
1- If I’m a curator estranged from my granddaughter Sophie McJesus I’d leave a long detailed message in a bank vault to which she gets a key from my estate in the event of my death; she won’t have to find anagrams of *Delaware Fish and Chips * (which she must translate into Swedish and then from Swedish into Hebrew omitting the letters for v, x, and u) or steal a Cellini salt shaker to find a microdot with an enigmatic backwards verse from the Apocalpsye of the Virgin Marvin to understand it. It’ll just say “Dear Sophie, sorry I missed your prom, did I ever mention you’re a direct descendant of Jesus? If not you are, enclosed some documentation, love Gramps. PS-Grandma sends her love, she’s still alive and lives in England.”
2- If I’m a terrorist determined to blow up the Vatican (or make it look like I’m determined to blow up the Vatican) I’ll give a note saying “Surprise, there’s a bomb in the Vatican, here’s four dead Preferiti [sp?]” and send it to the news media. I might also kidnap a rich blonde teenager along with the four Cardinals to make sure it’s all over CNN and Nancy Grace, because you actually want everyone to know this. Then if I’m really the Kelly Temp Pope I can still do my stuff (nobody’s going to force him to evacuate- not like OSHA or ATF have any jurisdiction anywhere overseas or in an independent papal state especially) and can still save the day.
- No anagrams or anything like, just wire $20 billion to this account and I’ll give you the disarming info. OR, if my purpose isn’t ransom but to take out civilization (no idea what Digital Fortress’s motivation or plot is) just do the courtesy of saying “there’s a bomb that’s going to take out Omaha in 2 hours, get everyone out, ciao”.
Instead these people come up with schemes that would make Bond villains say “too many steps”.
Nope.
CERN (which actually allowed some filming at one of their facilities) has an interesting ANGELS & DEMONS related FAQ about antimatter. One of the comments:
Another interesting one:
And remarkably spacious. Whereas in the real world archives repositories usually find that it makes far more sense to arrange shelving in their stacks as close together as possible.
Ewan McGregor has pretty much admitted in interviews that they had to change this because he couldn’t do an Italian accent. Hence the revised backstory. But it seems to me that this only creates a couple of further problems. Wouldn’t someone adopted as a boy have lost his Irish accent? And surely Belfast social services (in the 1970s?) would have had a problem with an unmarried foreign priest adopting a local orphan?
Of course, the most striking change from the book is that Dan Brown seems to have realised that papal conclaves do tend to be massive global news stories. What could possibly have happened in the past nine years to help that particular penny to drop?
This would have been long before the molestation scandals, but yes, that’s a bit odd.
Which itself is still way better than Deception Point, in which a Navy F-14 Tomcat lands on a snowbank in the Arctic Circle.
I thought it was freakin’ hysterical – I had a great time. My friend (whose idea it was to go see it) hated it, but I just sat there giggling and grinning the whole time.
Of course, I have the hots for Ewan McGregor, so that helped.
Believe it or not, the only plot point that truly stuck in my craw was that they had to go back into the archive to get a list of churches with Bernini statues. Yeah, I’m sure no guidebook in the city would have that info. :rolleyes:
That was the stupidest thing I have ever seen. Ever. Every time I think about all the stupidity, it makes me angry. So angry that I can’t even properly explain all my problems with it. If there was an justice in this world, Tom Hanks and Ron Howard would never work in Hollywood again. It was pretty funny though–unintentionally so.
The wife and I both liked the book. We just saw the movie this wekend and thought it was okay to see once. We didn’t get angry with any of it. Because we didn’t take it seriously, just sat back and enjoyed the ride. Sometimes, that’s all you’re meant to do.
Sure, if the ride was enjoyable. But it wasn’t. Everything Tom Hanks did was pointless. Everything. He didn’t even rescue the cardinal by himself from the fountain (realistic, but really, somebody probably would have pulled the dude from one of the most frequented fountains in Rome). Ewan did a fantastic job with what he was given and actually came across as the only vaguely interesting person in the bunch. The person who actually solved the puzzle was set up to be the antagonist (and little wonder. Apparently he knew all the time that Tom Hanks was just a douche getting in the way), and he figured the whole thing out off screen. Tom Hanks literally did not have to do anything to solve any crime–why was he the main character again? The only other vaguely interesting character was the assassin. I wanted to know more about that dude–like who he killed for before, why he became an assassin, and it didn’t hurt that he was quite the looker.
So I guess that’s what makes me angry. Ultimately, nothing in that movie had any point. Events would have transpired exactly as before (with maybe 4 dead cardinals instead of 3…maybe) if Tom Hanks had stayed in the US with his douche haircut. He was basically Mr. Exposition, which I guess I could have forgiven if he had been a secondary character to Richter–the guy who actually seemed to know what was going on. Hell, if it was just left to Tom Hanks, the movie would have ended with Pope Ewan McHottie.
I think everyone is overanalyzing the movie. It was, again, okay to see once. Since that’s what we expected going in, that may be why we weren’t put out.
BTW, just for FYI: In the book:
None of the four priests lives, and when the Hanks character tries to save that one priest underwater, he becomes engaged in an underwater battle with the assassin there in the fountain. He has another one inside Castel D’Angelo or whatever that was called, too; the assassin definitely did not feel the need not to have to kill the Hanks character. The Armin Mueller-Stahl character is the one who becomes pope at the end. The little Swiss-guard guy is the one who gives Hanks the Galileo tract, on behalf of the new pope, but he delivers it to the hotel that Hanks and the girl have checked into. Much is made in the book of the girl being a yoga master – it allows her to slip out of her bonds after she’s kidnapped in the church where the priest was burned alive – and the book ends with her about to demonstrate her yoga prowess on the Hanks character, hehehe. 
shrug
I was entertained. Now, obviously, there was absolutely nothing in the plot that made any kind of actual plausible sense if you give it a moment’s thought – so I didn’t. I just turned off my brain and hung out and watched it, and I found it entertaining in its sheer, raw badness.
In that dynamic, it reminds me of NCIS, a TV show I’m inordinately fond of. That’s another show where if you concern yourself with real-world plausibility, you won’t last five minutes – but if you accept it as an art form of absurdity, it’s a whole hell of a lot of fun.
I can’t criticize anyone who doesn’t enjoy that genre – shall we call it “Dada Action”? – but as someone who does, I had a great time at the movie.
(Note: for Dada Action to be really worth watching, you definitely need an appropriate lust object running around in the thick of things: Ewan McGregor, Mark Harmon …)
(Hm, yanno, I may actually have something with this Dada Action thing here.)
I liked it…not nearly as much as DaVinci Code, but it was fun.
Agreed…though, owing to the finite time-frame, it reminded me more of 24. The only thing missing was Langdon telling the Vatican officials, “I must have access to the Vatican Archives…OR MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WILL DIE!”
The other thing I was reminded of was the classic Python sketch “The Bishop”. Think about it–the first three cardinals die because Langdon and the police are just a little too late. In the fire scene, can’t you just hear Langdon saying, “We was too late! His Eminence tasted the fires of hell!”
My biggest complaint was that, considering they called in a symbologist (actually, more properly, semioticist), there really wasn’t a whole lot of symbology. Apart from the ambigrams and the hidden verses in Galileo’s pamphlet, all we basically had was a bunch of statues pointing this way and that. DVC was chock-full of symbols and puzzles, and was more enjoyable because of it.
Still, good but not great.
I’m not sure, because I’m not a physicist, but doesn’t the supposed God Particle mentioned in the movie actually refer to the Higgs-Boson particle, the particle that makes up quarks and all types of other tiny tiny matter? The God Particle isn’t anti-matter, is it?
(Emphasis mine.)
Judging from the lecture scenes in The Da Vinci Code (the book, I didn’t see the movie), Langdon isn’t even that. He’s obviously an Art History professor who specializes in religious symbolism.
IANAP either, but I think the harvesting of the anti-matter was a side result–the experiment in the supercollider was an attempt to isolate the Higgs-Boson.
But speaking of bad science, I read somewhere last week (don’t remember where, so I can’t provide a cite) that the containment field required to isolate that amount of antimatter would theoretically need to be about the size of a football field; at the very least, much larger than the drive-in bank tube it was housed in.
Also, doesn’t a retinal scanner read the blood vessels in the eye? It would be extremely difficult to gouge out a person’s eye without doing damage to the vessels; ergo, the scanner wouldn’t work.
His job title in TDVC is Professor of Religious Symbology and Iconography, IIRC.
Lab coats are basically smocks. They’re supposed to protect your clothes from things like chemical spills or bodily fluids (in the case of lab coats worn by doctors). There’s no reason why a physicist who doesn’t work with anything that might spill on his or her clothes would wear a lab coat. Someone who worked with antimatter might wear something that protected them from radiation, but a lab coat doesn’t do that.
I got a degree in physics, and only wore a lab coat once (I borrowed it). I dressed as a mad scientist one Halloween, and you need a lab coat for a proper mad scientist costume.
Well, duh, lab coats symbolize scientificalness, and since this movie is all about symbols, obviously, you need lab coats. QED.