Necessary Roughness

I had not expected to go see this movie. My wife had enjoyed the book and wanted to see the movie, so I went along. She looked my way several times as if to gauge my reaction during several scenes.

If one needs theological refutations to most of the claims in this movie they can start at Preachrblog, CTSFW, and Extreme Theology. The damnedest of the heresies in my opinion is not whether Christ took a wife, but rather the denial of the dual nature of the Son of God and Son of Man. If He’s not God, he is under the curse as we are, and he can’t be the prophesied innocent sacrifice. If He’s not man, he doesn’t atone for our sins. Either error causes a person to doubt that Christ died for his or her sins, and either is a road to damnation.

I also wonder if various churches feel the need to respond to these type of films because they feel that their parishioners aren’t boned up enough in their doctrine in the first place. A military doesn’t wait until it’s attacked to start procuring armor; the Church shouldn’t wait until it feels threatened by this movie to teach the atonement of True God and True Man, Christ’s own claim of exclusivity, and church history such as the Council of Nicea and the divisions of books into canonical, apocrypha, heresy, and so forth. There will always be attacks on the Church; most aren’t made with a multimillion-dollar budget.

That’s enough about the theology. Boil all of that away, and what you have is a scavenger hunt. Light spoilers follow.

The action was okay but slow in places; there’s a scene where Sophie Neveu is evading the police driving a funny-looking car in reverse that struck me as funny. There is a scene towards the end when Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) and Neveu are about to discover the tomb of Mary Magdalene inside a church, and a ton of people come quietly into the building that builds good suspense.

There were some decent directing moments. The viewer figures out quickly that Langdon is claustrophobic, and a quick flashback of a kid drowning in a well tells us why. It explained his fear better than Sir Leigh Teabing’s (Ian McKellen) chatter later in the movie. Some moments weren’t as good, such as the nearly bright-as-day foreshadowing of a part of the Louvre that Langdon found very remarkable.

There is a scene where Teabing’s butler makes a big deal about keeping secret the identity of the main bad guy, “The Teacher,” secret. He’s given a flask, he dies (duh), and we find out who The Teacher is with very little shock or drama.

There is a scene where the atheist Neveu gets some vengeful slapping in on the bound albino monk (who has blue eyes in several scenes) who killed her grandfather. She says, “Your God doesn’t kill!” and then leaves him. He then has a look as if this is news. He should have at least given her some nice arrogant backtalk.

I think this movie tries to be an action thriller type movie, but the suspense and action are not intense enough to warrant the long breaks provided by Teabing’s rant on the Church and by the explanation of Neveu’s ancestry. It’s not really fantasy despite all the fiction, because there are no opposing moral forces: just this story of a hateful church oppressing women and people protecting/hiding a “truth”. The main characters work so hard to discover this truth, and once it’s discovered, they bury it to protect someone. The big question, “What if the greatest conspiracy of the past 2000 years was true?” is never answered.

If someone wants to read a cool book about what happens when a scandal threatens Christianity, I recommend A Skeleton in God’s Closet by Paul Maier. There, one is presented with a scenario that would really shake the foundations of Christianity: what if the bones of Christ were discovered?