…by making me look at Tom Hanks in a Speedo.

Okay, so it was through a layer of water, but still. What was that supposed to accomplish in my psyche?

So, yeah, went to see it. It’s showing every half hour or so in probably three of the theaters in the multiplex down the street. Theater for the 7:30 was maybe half full. But the place in general was fairly empty, I thought. 7:30 on a Saturday night and no line at the concessions?

I really see no need to repeat what most other people are saying. Some brief comments (and remember, I still haven’t read the book. And won’t. There’s 1.99 of my hard-earned money down the drain…)

There’s spoilers down below in the very next paragraph so don’t whine that you weren’t warned.

Did you hear me? You were warned. Okay, I’ll stick a photo here so your eyes won’t wander before you click away.

He’s wearing clerics. Really!

(And maybe a Speedo he didn’t have time to remove since he was airlifted from Cambridge to Rome on the “Vatican Jet.” How come the Pope gets stuck with Alitalia and the Harvard guy gets the Vatican Jet?)

• The plot is preposterous to the point of madness even when you realize that what you thought was the plot wasn’t the plot at all. That is (and here ya go), the plot says that the Illuminati are trying to explode the Vatican, when it’s not, in fact, the Illuminati-it’s an Irish priest who is afraid of a rapprochement between science and religion and who has…(deep breath)…killed the “progressive” Pope-who was his dad, right?-who wasn’t all scared of the anti-matter issue and then paid a guy to steal anti-matter from CERN, learned all about the supposed trail of the Illuminati through Rome, which he pays the guy to follow as he (the guy) very elaborately tries to kill four Cardinals-after branding their chests with Illuminati signs-and who (the Irish priest) ultimately saves the Vatican from being exploded by the antimatter when he flies a helicopter with the antimatter in it up to the sky where it explodes and he parachutes down and might have, as a result, been elected Pope on the spot if it were not for Tom Hanks.

Who was not in a Speedo at the time.

Got it?

(Question for those that have seen/read it-none of it makes much sense, but the whole-grab the anti-matter and fly it up into the sky makes the least sense. What am I missing? Did he plan that part of it? Did he want it to explode down in the Scavi and blow up St. Peter’s? Or was he planning the savior-then-be-elected pope thing? Should I even bother to ask this question?)

• Very nice production values. I am really interested in how they did the scenes in St. Peter’s and the Pantheon, in particular, since they were not allowed to film in those churches, of course, and they had some pretty wide shots that looked very convincing. My sons says there are really good…what did he call them…compilers? I don’t remember…out there, who do just this kind of work with CGI and so on. I suppose that’s it, but it was still interesting.

• The movie is just full of dumb mistakes about Catholicism even before we get to the science issue. Mistakes which have been amply documented everywhere, including…er, no the Carmelengo would not be a fresh-faced Ewan McGregor non-Cardinal priest, no there is no such thing as a “Grand Cardinal Elector” and no there are no “Preferiti” Cardinals who are the front-runners for the papacy. I do love the super-secret Vatican Archives with clear vacuum-sealed rooms labeled “Bernini” and such with a black papal Mercedes sitting in the middle of it all, though. Sweet! I want to go to there!

• I never knew that protesters had a habit of getting into fistfights about stem-cell research while waiting for white smoke in St. Peter’s Square. Huh.

• That Robert Langdon is super-good at figuring out deep mysteries by just looking at stuff, like what direction a statue’s finger is pointing and thinking about a cool number. Maybe I’ll ask him to do my taxes next year.

• I find the whole time issue incredibly irritating. I can’t buy any of it anyway, but, as with DVC, the fact that these characters are doing things in the space of four hours that would take, you know…at least six…just bugs me.

• The science/religion stuff is, of course stupid and wrong. And amply refuted all over the place-take a look at Carl Olson’s post and links to other sources here.

As for the essential possible impact of the movie, I agree with Carl:

So, what of the movie’s portrayal of the Catholic Church? If you watched only mainstream news coverage, you might not even be aware Angels & Demons could, in some way, possibly-just maybe-be offensive to Catholics. In some interviews about Brown and his novels, I’ve tried to make two basic points:

1.      Angels & Demons is not the same beast as The Da Vinci Code, and the situation in 2009 is much different than it was in 2006, when the first movie came out and was riding a massive tsunami wave of publicity and controversy. The novel/movie Angels & Demons is hardly friendly to Catholicism or to historical fact, but it is not as unremittingly anti-Catholic as The Da Vinci Code, nor is it as focused on foundational beliefs and doctrines. (It is just as silly and sloppy, but that’s a secondary issue.)

2.      That said, my biggest concern with Angels & Demons has not been with what it proposes as much as with what it reinforces, namely, the convenient but thoroughly false notion that the Catholic Church is an enemy-even a violent, bloody one-of science and reason.

With this second point we reach the strange nexus where entertainment and reality perform an uneasy dance upon the squirrely stage of popular culture. I say “strange” and “uneasy” because this dance seems to change depending on who is choosing the tune, and the tune changes depending on who wishes to control the dance. When Catholics, for instance, complain about Brown’s sloppiness with facts (which is, frankly, an overly nice way of putting it), they are often chided for not realizing that it’s “just entertainment” and “just a novel” and “just a movie.” Yet this fails to make sense of why Brown’s novels/movies are entertaining to so many millions, and why the disputed claims about history, religion, and art are often trotted out as key reasons why the novels/movies are entertaining.

What I would add to Carl’s point #1 above is that while the meme that the Catholic Church has always been the enemy of scientific “progress” is certainly out there and even taken for granted, the DVC claims are of a slightly different quality, and not just because they are foundational-but because they echo bits and pieces of first, popular pseudo-scholarship about Jesus’ origins and Mary Magdalene, that are taken seriously by more people than you realize and secondly, because elements of the book’s foundation reflect actual scholarly opinions-primarily the way of framing early Christian history as a battle of sorts between different, yet all equally “true” Christian narratives.

He really caught a wave on that one.

Fr. Robert Barron has (as usual) very good commentary highlighting the truth that Angels & Demons has it backwards-in the modern world, it’s not Catholicism that’s fighting tooth and nail against science-it’s atheistic materialism that’s fighting tooth and nail against religious faith:

“In point of fact, it is not Catholicism that feels the need constantly to revive the struggle between science and the faith, but rather secular modernity-and Ron Howard’s movie itself is exhibit A. There is a stubbornly enduring myth that the ‘modern’ world-especially in its scientific expression-emerged out of a terrible struggle with backward-looking Catholicism. And thus many avatars of modernity feel the need on a regular basis to bring out the Catholic Church as a scapegoat and punching-bag, as if to re-enact the founding myth. Of course, the central act in this drama is the story of Galileo’s persecution at the hands of the ignorant and vindictive Church, and so Brown and Howard bring the great Renaissance scientist front and center: Langdon is almost suffocated by wicked Vaticanisti while he diligently researches in the Galileo archive, and at the end of the film, a grateful Cardinal rewards the intrepid scientist with a long-hidden text of the master. Well.

“Though these facts are well known, and though I’ve rehearsed them before, it appears that they bear repeating. Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas were early advocates of Aristotelian science; Copernicus, the popularizer of the heliocentric understanding of the solar system, was a priest; Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics and a chief forerunner of Darwin, was a monk; many of the founders of modern science-Newton, Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz-were devoutly religious men; the formulator of the Big Bang theory of cosmic origins was a priest. Perhaps most importantly, the modern physical sciences emerged precisely in the context of a Christian culture, where the belief in creation and hence in universal intelligibility was taken for granted. And today, the supposedly sinister and anti-scientific Vatican sponsors a number of observatories and supports societies at its pontifical universities devoted to dialogue with the sciences at the very highest levels. Despite the tragedy of the Galileo incident, prompted by the ignorance and, in some cases, ill-will of certain churchmen at the time, Catholicism is not the enemy of science and feels absolutely no compulsion to define itself over against science as though the two are locked in a kind of zero-sum game. It is a longstanding conviction of the Church that since God is one and since all truth comes from God, there can finally be no conflict between the truths of revelation and the truths discoverable through the exercise of human reason. And so the Church rejoices in whatever the empirical sciences uncover and expects no conflict between those discoveries and its own faith, rightly interpreted.”

The last (I hope) thing I want to say about Angels & Demons is that it once more puts on display the sadness of wasted opportunities. Lots of creative energies and resources put into something that is ultimately mindless and silly, and not in a good way-in a sort of waste-of-time kind of way.

But there are more wasted opportunities than that. There’s a very interesting theme, noted by some reviewers-that of Robert Langdon as the reluctant vessel of God’s will. That is-in the end, the Church is “saved” because of Langdon’s actions, something pointed out to him by a previously power-hungry, but now-chastened Cardinal-all of this taking place as the new Pope-the only kidnapped Cardinal to not be killed, and that because Langdon rescued him from certain drowning in the Four Rivers Fountain in Piazza Navona (okay, he had weights tied to him..) Langdon is skeptical, of course, but the Cardinal is certain that God was using him. Amid all the crushing stupidity and the incorrect underlying assumption that the Church is not open to science because and only because of Robert Langdon-there’s a tiny glimmer of authenticity there-of interesting truth about the complexities of God’s ways-but of course, in the context of the simple-mindedness and crude willful ignorance of the rest of the film, it is, as I said, wasted.

Of course, in this, as in DVC, the primary image of the Church is of an institution that is primarily interested in keeping secrets in order to maintain power-even at the end, as everything seems to work out, lies continue to be told about various characters’ fates.

But since this film is, interestingly enough, blasting across the nation at the same time as the Rembert Weakland show…well, maybe…a clearing of throats and continued attention to cleaning of one’s own house is in order, just as much if not more than the task of critiquing works of pop culture.