Angels & Demons: the protestations of Ron Howard, the director of Angels & Demons, that this film is not anti-Catholic ring hollow and are an insult to intelligence.(Movie review)

Angels & Demons, the controversial film directed by Ron Howard and based on Dan Brown's book by the same name, is as fanciful as it is controversial.

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As it begins, we learn that the pope has just died, and a Conclave--an assembly of cardinals who will elect a new pope--is soon to commence in Vatican City. Unbeknownst to the crowds and media gathered in St. Peter's Square, however, a great evil lurks among them. The four preferiti, the cardinals most likely to assume the papacy, have been abducted by the shadowy Illuminati and are to be systematically murdered, one every hour starting at 8 p.m. Even more ominously, the conspirators have also stolen a canister of antimatter from the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, and have hidden it in Vatican City along with the preferiti. And, once the mechanical canister's battery runs down--which is expected to occur at midnight--the antimatter will cease being held in suspension, come into contact with matter, and detonate, creating a five-megaton blast that will destroy the holy city. The clock is ticking.

To help them thwart the Illuminati plot, the Vatican police decide to approach Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, a character played by Tom Hanks. Langdon is joined by Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), a physicist and co-creator of the antimatter.

Angels & Demons is a fairly fast-paced movie, interposing action scenes between Langdon's flexing of his intellectual muscle, as he analyzes ancient rites and symbolism in an effort to unravel the mystery at hand. But the film is silly and simplistic. It is rated PG-13, and this is no doubt because it does portray some violence and gore. As for language, the worst examples are "hell" and "b*****d," and I don't remember the Lord's name being taken in vain at all.

Despite this, Angels & Demons' irreverence is profound. Langdon is the character who locked horns with the Catholic Church in The Da Vinci Code (also directed by Ron Howard and based on a Dan Brown book), and he is a thoroughly secular academic who has a decidedly snide attitude toward the church. Yet this is just the tip of the iceberg, as the whole film is infused with fabrications which, it just so happens, in every case serve to impugn Christianity.

Really, though, the problem starts with the rather fanciful notion that the church would have to recruit an Ivy League symbologist to save the day. If letters after a name are what awe you, know that there is no shortage of Ph.D.s at the Vatican. As for expertise in symbolism, ancient orders, and rituals, well, this is the Catholic Church, ya' know? It has only been studying such things for the last two millennia. That's about 1,500 years before the birth of Harvard, which, incidentally, was named after a minister and founded by Puritan Calvinists for the purposes of training clergy.