Music/Music Reviews

Last night, I went with some of the youth from church and some additional folks to see ‘The Davinci Code’ (won’t bother linking, you can get it just about anywhere…) and I have to say it was an o.k. movie…yes, just o.k.

Theologically, it was way less subtle than I expected it to be. It may be that I have a bit more than a passing familiarity with some of the concepts he presented (e.g. the sacred feminine and gnosticism), but still the agenda of the movie couldn’t have been more obvious especially when the book Langdon wrote was entitled ‘The Sacred Feminine’; it was almost like seeing a big freight train coming right towards you when it is miles away. Or, even thinking about it right now, even the whole idea of Jesus being mortal was a secret knowledge that the main characters went searching for.

What I wasn’t expecting was how they framed pieces of history that I was a bit more familiar with such as the council of Nicea. How Brown frames it, Constatine was a Pagan who basically crafted modern Christianity as we know it today and used the council to essentially make it all up. This would be the equivilant to saying the apollo moon landings goal was to search out and mine the moon of its vast green cheese repositories.
The movie itself is definately a renter. The plot was a bit slower than I was expecting and for the first time in a while I was actually confused about the motivations of some of the main characters. I wish they had flushed out a bit more of Silas’ character out; that was a common complaint amongst many of the characters that I saw that were fronted by A-list actors. They had the emotional range to let us know why they were the way they were but they just didn’t have screen time; Howard blew too much of it trying to push the agenda of the film. Even at that, Hank’s character seemed to want to offer an apologetic for the movie at the end with his whole ‘believe what you choose to believe’ speech and it only came off feeling forced, IMO.  One of the more transparent moments of the movie (that almost looked improved) was when the female lead, after finding out Jesus was her ancestor, decided to put her foot on a pond to see if she could walk on it and turned to Tom Hanks and said something to the effect of “Nope.  I guess I should try that water to wine trick at my next party”.  It was cute…
It was also hard to follow the differences between Opus Dei and the Priory of Scion in the movie as well. The motivations and desires of both of those groups didn’t really become clear until the end of the movie.

The movie reminded me of Dune in that it assumed you’d read the book and allowed the book to fill in some of the backstory.

The movie was slow, but as a popcorn flick it was an o.k. movie. There were plenty of car chases, espionage and the like to make it a watchable movie. There were enough respectable actors to make it entertaining too; I think to some level having as many names in it as it did made it a watchable movie rather than one that was just poor.

You’d do yourself a favor to research the council of nicea and gnosticism before going to the movie; you’ll appreciate just how insipid the history that is painted in the movie is.

I think, overall, it’s a renter.