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As the phenomenal success of The Da Vinci Code attests, there is a huge reservoir of modern fascination with ancient Christian esoterica, a social and cultural phenomenon that Philip Jenkins has exhaustively documented in his Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way.
Peter’s Basilica, one is left wondering if, in his pre-Code days, Brown was too penurious to spring the five dollars for English-language tours of the archaeological excavations given by seminarians from the nearby North American College.ĭespite its limitations, Angels & Demons is great fun. Just from the confused description of the scavi under the crypt of St. The novel’s narrative, as well as its front maps, wreaks havoc on Roman and Vatican City geography. No doubt, some eminently qualified art historian will, if he or she has not yet done so, publish a devastating catalog of the woeful inadequacies of Brown’s knowledge of Raphael, the encrypting artist of this novel, just as Bruce Boucher of the Chicago Art Institute did with respect to the author’s use of Leonardo da Vinci. Like its sequel, Angels & Demons is filled with historical and other factual inaccuracies, even if one forgives the author his ignorance of the workings of the Roman Curia (e.g., the Camerlengo, or “chamberlain,” of the Roman Church is the cardinal who assumes the regency upon the death of a pope, not lowly priest who labored as the deceased’s personal domestic assistant). This Middle Eastern interloper is killing the would-be pontiffs in a grisly manner of at regular intervals, leaving their corpses in Roman churches, while Langdon and Vetra fille comb through the Secret Vatican Archives for clues for the whereabouts of the long-forgotten Illuminati lair in order to stop the murderous spree and save the assembled cardinals (and the Church’s priceless art collection) from a premature encounter with the Almighty. Meanwhile, the devious Illuminati have not only hidden their WMD somewhere in the sacred precincts of Vatican, but have hired a scion of the ancient Assassin sect to kidnap the four cardinals whom Brown calls the preferiti (“preferred”) contenders for the papal succession (the actual Italian term is papabile, literally, “pope-able”). Brown’s protagonists quickly prove their worth to suspicious papal bureaucrats by discovering evidence that the late pontiff’s death was anything but natural. Their chase is complicated by the fact that the Church is in the midst of the sede vacante-the old pope has died and the College of Cardinals has gathered to elect his successor. Together, Langdon and Vetra set off for the Eternal City where the murderers of the elder Vetra have absconded with his antimatter device and threaten to use it to blow the Vatican and its denizens sky high.
Like the sequel, Langdon is joined in his inquest by a sensuous but cerebral survivor of the victim, in this case a “bio entanglement physicist,” Vittoria Vetra, the dead priest’s adopted daughter. Langdon is called in to investigate because the death crime scene carries-literally-the mark of the Illuminati, an age-old secret society whose members have sworn vengeance on the Church of Rome for its persecution of scholars and other freethinkers during the Counter-Reformation. A “prequel” to The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons chronicles Harvard “symbologist” Robert Langdon’s first foray into the world of the Vatican one year before he is caught in the war between its Opus Dei proxies and the “Priory of Sion.” Like The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons opens with the murder of a scholar, this time Leonardo Vetra, a priest and physicist at Switzerland’s CERN, “the world’s largest scientific research facility,” who has discovered the secret of creating and bottling antimatter. Spurred on no doubt by The Da Vinci Code hoopla, Dan Brown’s fans continue to push his less intricately crafted Angels & Demons to the top of the bestseller lists.