Angels and Demons

+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
21 Jun 2009

I was a bit disappointed that I enjoyed Dan Brown's film Angels and Demons and found that it wasn't thoroughly anti-Catholic.

Everything happens with a rush in this middle brow ecclesiastical James Bond without the sex.  But it works and many people have seen it.  No one I knew found it boring.

The producers have learned from the mistakes made in the Da Vinci Code film, which was slow, because the story-line in the Angels and Demons film is apparently tighter than in the book.

The palaces and churches of the Vatican City and Rome provide a spectacular setting for this gimmicky thriller.  Nothing is straight forward as the action moves in bizarre directions towards a double somersault of an ending.  The fact that the film was shot on sets constructed in California proves to be no handicap.

The Illuminati are a secret society of intellectuals, scientific terrorists, plotting violence and revenge against the Catholic Church, who killed their predecessors four hundred years ago.  In fact they were an unscientific Masonic group, who wanted power and were closed down by the Bavarian police in the 1780s, but the film does not pretend to realism or historical accuracy.

Once again Robert Langdon, a remarkably athletic and practical professor of symbology at Harvard University, is called in, this time by the Vatican to investigate the murder of a scientist.  The Pope has died and Langdon discovers that a secret society plans to kill four cardinals and use anti-matter stolen from Switzerland to blow up the Vatican.  He rushes around Rome from clue to clue in a convoy of cars and screeching tyres risking the life of every passer-by in a progress which is implausible even by the standards of Roman traffic.  The worst is avoided, but some of the major players are not at all what they seem and the hard line religious extremists are committed to violence.

Is the film anti-Catholic?  The official Vatican newspaper described it as "a smart commercial operation" which is accurate, but I am not sure that its further verdict of "harmless entertainment" is completely true.

Certainly a young Catholic university friend of mine saw it with some of her non-Catholic friends, who wished they belonged to such an exotic organization!  All of them did not want the cardinals to die and enjoyed the film as a classy and surreal thriller.

The film moves at many levels and we bring our own presuppositions when we view it.  In real life Catholics are a mixed bunch but the arch terrorists and murderers in this tale prove to be conservative and fanatical Catholics.

I wonder how many similar popular movies would place a Muslim or Jew in such a role.