Category: Film and TV

Yesterday I did a couple of posts about efforts by fans and now, possibly, by J. J. Abrams, to re-cast the characters of the original Star Trek series in order to allow new stories to be told about them more easily.

I did so to build up to this:

A PROPOSAL BY JOE STRACZYNSKI AND BRYCE ZABEL FOR THEIR VISION OF HOW STAR TREK SHOULD BE REJUVENATED.
(CHT to the readre who e-mailed!)

They sent this proposal to Paramount back in 2004 and . . . well . . . nothing came of it. But it’s an interesting proposal.

Basically, they propose rebooting the Star Trek universe so that the writers won’t be boxed in by all the massive continuity recent Star Trek writers have been burdened with. Giving the universe a fresh start would allow them to take the exciting, interesting things about the series that made it popular, without having to be constrained in the stories they can tell by all the material that later followed.

It would also let them re-cast the characters so that we could have new stories involving Kirk, Spock, and McCoy–the triumvirate at the heart of the original series.

The basic idea was to offer another take on the original five-year mission–this time giving it a definite story arc and retelling classic tales in a new way, while supplementing them with entirely new stories.

What they had in mind is quite interesting–putting a significant mystery at the heart of the series in a way that would tie it toghether. They write:

As noted above and as established in television history, Kirk was the youngest starship
captain in the Federation…but what led to this? We know that the Enterprise was sent out
to explore where no human had gone before…but if you stop and think about it for a
moment, isn’t that an odd assignment…to take one of the finest ships in the fleet, give it to
the youngest captain in the Federation, and tell them to just go drive around and see what
they can find?

It’s peculiar…until you allow for the possibility that they were looking for something
specific…something they had to keep a secret even from the rest of the crew.

The series treatment gives you a pretty good idea of what Straczynski and Zabel intended the secret to be, and it would have been interesting to see them get the chance to do it.

I found reading the series treatment quite interesting from a
literary perspective. Not only did they have to do a lot of
salesmanship as part of their attempt to convince network execs to give
them a chance, they also spent a surprising amount of time explaining
the concept of a reboot and how it would work. I guess studio execs in 2004 couldn’t be expected to be familiar with such concepts and had to be given a "let me lead you by the hand" explanation. (Probably not a bad idea. JMS tells horror stories about his initial attempts to get studio execs to understand the idea of Babylon 5 having rotational gravity.) Now you could just point to Battlestar Galactica, tho.

On his blog, where Dark Skies creator Bryce Zabel posted the treatment, he indicated that they also held back a lot of what they had in mind from the treatment, indicating that they had in mind a reboot somewhat like the Battlestar Galactica reboot that Ron Moore did, which would have resulted in a much grittier, edgier, and (frankly) interesting series than the kind of clean-as-a-whistle, formal, polyester kind of series that we got in Voyager (for example).

He also mentions that he’s had a whole new set of thoughts about how Star Trek could be revived since the 2004 proposal.

So be sure to

READ THE POST.

Ever since Star Trek Enterprise went and got itself cancelled (due to the bad decisions of its producers, such as not focusing on the Earth-Romulan War, and despite the much better fourth season that came too late to save it), Star Trek fans have had no new Star Trek to watch–except for fan productions like Star Trek New Voyages.

Now it looks like they may.

When Enterprise was cancelled it was stated (a) that there would indeed be future Star Trek productions (Paramount would be foolish to simply let the franchise die) but (b) there would be no new TV show for some time (Paramount would be foolish to put a new one on too soon, before the demand for one had had a chance to build again) and (c) the most likely next installment of the franchise would be a movie.

Rumors circulated around Hollywood for some time about what this movie might be about–possibly the Earth-Romulan War . . . possibly the story of how Kirk and Spock first met (these being the most logical two stories to try to tell next).

Now Paramount has officially announced the movie.

And it’s signed major talent to oversee it: J. J. Abrams, the guy behind Lost and Alias and Mission Impossible III.

Of course, the movie–or Abrams involvement in it–may not work out. Hollywood is a notoriously entropic place, meaning that deals have a tendency to fall apart there.

It sounds, at present, like Abrams and his team are currently thinking about doing the Kirk-Spock story, using new actors to play the young characters.

Which is why I mentioned New Voyages earlier: The New Voyages folks have decided that these characters are iconic enough in our culture that they should not be forever tied to the particular actors who originated them, the way Hamlet or MacBeth or the Mikado are not tied to the actors who originally played those parts.

In other words: Fans should learn to disassociate the characters from the actors.

This would allow the franchise to tell new stories about established and interesting characters and not have to invent and then sell to the fans a whole new cast every time one cast needed to retire.

Y’know: The way James Bond and Sherlock Holmes have been played by something like fifty guys each.

And there’s a reason I mention Star Trek XI and its possible recasting of major parts.

More on that tomorrow.

In the meantime,

GET THE STORY

and

LEARN ABOUT J. J. ABRAMS.

I assume from various pieces of evidence I’ve encountered that there are a bunch of Star Trek fans out there making their own fan films based on the franchise.

I further assume that most of these are pretty lousy.

But I don’t know, because I haven’t seen them.

One fan-produced Star Trek effort has stood out, though, and I have actually seen some of it (though not enough to do a full review at this point).

The series is called Star Trek New Voyages, and it has managed to achieve unprecedented success.

The idea is that the series will use modern amateur film techniques (which are getting quite good) to produce the episodes that would have been needed to fill out the remaining two years of the original Enterprise’s "five year mission" (y’know: the two years they didn’t get to film because they got cancelled after season 3) and these episodes will be released direct-to-web.

The show thus features the original series cast of characters, though with different actors playing them (usually).

What makes the series unusual is the degree of quality that the folks behind it are trying to put into it. Their sets, for example, are virtually identical to those used on the original series–so identical, in fact, that when Star Trek Enterprise needed a copy of Mr. Sulu’s extendible console viewer thingie (as seen here) for their Mirror Universe episodes and the prop department didn’t have it any more, the producers of the TV show called the New Voyages folks to borrow the fans’ version of the prop rather than make their own.

The level of quality that they’re trying to put into the show has been so great (relative to other fan productions operating on a shoestring) that they’ve been able to get numerous professionals connected with the TV series to participate in New Voyages as well. This includes not only Gene Roddenberry’s son and actors who had minor roles in the original series but also writers from the original series, Next Gen, and Deep Space 9, including such noteables as D. C. Fontana and David Gerrold.

And now some of the main cast from the original series is getting into the act.

This September they’ll be releasing an episode in which Walter Koenig reprises his role as Checkov (an older version of himself who meets the younger version normally on New Voyages), and I’m anticipating that this episode will be used as Koenig’s swan song for the character (i.e., I’m expecting the older Checkov to die in it and thus tie up his character arc).

George Takei is also going to be reprising his role as Sulu in an upcoming episode.

Unfortunately, they’re only making one of these a year at present, so they may have to re-cast all the parts once again before they get to the end of the fifth year (if they get that far), but it’s interesting to note the success they’ve had thus far.

ABOUT THE PROJECT.

VISIT THE OFFICIAL WEB SITE.

Now, there’s a specific reason I mention all this.

More on that later.

A while back I posted HERE regarding the efforts of gay-advocacy magazine The Advocate to recast Superman as an icon of gay culture.

In the wake of that story, it was nice to see Superman Returns director Bryan Singer among the many pooh-poohing this notion — Singer’s own sexual preferences notwithstanding.

Singer described Superman as “probably the most heterosexual character in any movie I’ve ever made.”

GET THE STORY.

Incidentally, SDG has posted his review of Superman Returns — so get the straight story on the film HERE.

Being that two of my JA.O blogmates have posted recently on the topic of super-heroes, I had to throw in my two pfennigs.

A few weeks ago our family acquired (cheap) a copy of the original (Adam West) Batman movie (1966).

Okay, I admit it… I have no taste. I like this movie better than any of the darker, more recent Batman films (except Batman Forever) and it is a guilty pleasure that I have passed on to my kids. They have really enjoyed it. One measure of the success of a film in our house is when we go around for weeks afterward inserting bits of the dialogue into our everyday speech. Batman 1966 qualifies in spades.

The movie is campy, fun, clean, goofy, brimming with Bat-gadgets and fisticuffs, and boasts the greatest cast of Bat-villains ever. Like the classic Looney Toons, the humor of the movie (as well as the series) operates on different levels. As a kid I missed a lot of the grown-up jokes and sexual innuendo, but had a blast, anyway.

For the record, in this film Batman is intensely heterosexual.

The main reason I’m posting on Batman, though, is a scene toward the end of the film, where the President of the United States makes an appearance (more or less… we see his chair and one arm from behind). He sports a generic Texas twang and, though it isn’t really a straight impersonation, it is obviously meant to represent then President Lyndon Johnson.

What’s weird is that, though it doesn’t sound like Johnson, the voice sounds remarkably, uncannily like George W. Bush.

SEE IF IT DOESN’T!

[JIMMY ADDS: If you watch this movie, don’t miss the MUST SEE (!) "Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb!’ scene. It’s hilarious!]

[JIMMY ALSO ADDS: There’s an interesting episode of the Batman TV series in which they play off Lyndon Johnson’s political misfortunes and the fact that due to his unpopularity he didn’t run for re-election when he legally could have. In this episode, Batman is running for mayor of Gotham City in order to stop a villain from getting the post, and the episode is transparently meant to be a "Batman runs for president" episode under the surface (e.g., they mention the cowboys and indians voting in the western precincts of Gotham City). At the end of the episode, after Batman has won and turned the mayorship over the the guy who really should be mayor, he is in Commissioner Gordon’s office when he receives a phone call from a major, unnamed political party asking him to be their presidential candidate. He politely declines, but he and the commissioner comment on how nice it was of "them" to ask. At this point, we have no idea which party it was that asked, but then Batman gets another call, from the other political party, asking him the same thing, and he replies, "I . . . thought your party already had a presidential candidate for 1968." ZING!]

When I saw this cover on the Drudge Report, I grimaced.

Why would The Advocate–a notorious homosexual magazine–be running a cover story asking "How gay is Superman?" and showing a picture from the upcoming movie Superman Returns?

Did it mean that the actor picked to play Superman (about whom I know nothing) is gay? Did it mean that the movie contains a homosexual theme or plot element?

The answer to those two questions is, apparently, "no," for which I am relieved.

Instead, according to the L.A. Times, The Advocate’s article dealt with an attempt to view superheroes in a homosexual light.

This is something that is not that surprising.

I don’t know precisely what to attribute it to, but the homosexual community frequently seeks to reinterpret wholesome American icons in homosexual terms.

That’s why so many men in homosexual parades dress up as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, or why the idea of gay cowboys in Brokeback Mountain struck such a note with the homosexual community. Re-reading superheroes in this light looks like a continuation of the same theme of the homosexualization of what is in itself wholesome and innocent.

I can only imagine that those in the gay community who do this kind of thing take a kind of perverse delight in reinterpreting icons of goodness and decency in this fashion. In that perverse delight, by definition, there is an element of perversity that would infuriate many in the gay community if it were labelled with a particular noun which is a cognate of "perverse" and a synonym for "perversity."

Unfortunately, those in the homosexual community who are doing this kind of thing are not without collaborators.

That explains why D.C. Comics would allow the reinterpretation of Batwoman as a "lipstick lesbian" (which, I discovered, is a lesbian who cultivates a feminine rather than a "butch" appearance). The announcement of that was particularly disgusting to me, since I remember the original Batwoman from reprints of old Batman stories that I read as a child, and the original Batwoman was created as a love interest for Batman himself.

It also explains why–according to the L.A. Times story–the marketing department promoting Superman Returns is apparently advertising the movie in homosexual venues in an attempt to pull in gay moviegoers–but without alienating the straight community that is expected to form the core audience of the film.

I can only view such efforts with contempt.

While the film itself is meant to be a thematic followup to the first two Superman movies, which were quite good, if Warner Brothers is specifically trying to get the gay community out to see this film in order to play off of a desire to subvert wholesome American images so that it can make more money then it is contributing to the subversion and homosexualization of American culture.

GET THE STORY.

The Media Research Center has an interesting new report comparing the MSM’s coverage of The Da Vinci Code compared to its coverage of The Passion of the Christ.

THERE’S A NOTABLE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO.

Is anyone shocked?

I basically don’t watch TV any more. Most TV shows–even ones that I like and intend to watch–don’t motivate me to tune in each week. So what I’ve done with such shows is to just watch them on DVD when they come out.

That way I don’t have the hassles of commercials or having to tune in each week or being frustrated by cliffhangers (except for the season finale).

That’s the up side. The down side is that I also have to wait a really long time between getting to see seasons of the show, but it works for me.

I’ve just started watching the second season of The 4400, which just arrived in the mail, and so far I’m pleased. The opening episode is two hours (well, 90 minutes) long, and it serves as an effective reintroduction to the premise and cast of the show–though  the first few minutes of it were a little rough given how long it’d been since I saw season one.

You may not have heard of The 4400 since it’s not getting that much publicity, but here are the basics: It’s a show that airs on the USA Network and–like other USA Network shows (such as Monk)–it has really short seasons (12 episodes in the second, and even less in the first). But they’re trying to do quality rather than quantity, which is what is important to me.

The show was co-created by Rene Echevarria, who was one of the best writers on Next Gen and DS9. It also has Ira Stephen Behr as a regular writer. He also was one of the best Next Gen/DS9 writers. It was their names which got me to watch the first season, and I wasn’t disappointed.

The premise is that, beginning in 1941, a bunch of people–4400 of them (big surprise)–were abducted, apparently by aliens (though we’re later told that isn’t the case) and then returned–all at the same moment–in the present day.

When they were returned, the government did the only sensible thing: It locked them up.

But eventually it was determined that they didn’t seem to be a threat to themselves or others, and so they were released. The government’s still watching them, still trying to figure out what’s up with the whole getting abducted and then being returned all at once thing. It’s a good thing that the government’s watching, because a few of the 4400 start manifesting unusual abilities that even they don’t understand or know why they have.

The writing on the show is quite good, and Echevarria and his team have avoided some of the obvious traps that a series like this could fall into. The government is not persecuting the 4400. It’s acting reasonably. We don’t have an evil government versus righteous 4400 plot. This isn’t a standard good versus evil show. Both members of the 4400 and the normal population are shown being good and bad, helpful and creepy.

That ambiguity is the stuff that human drama is made of.

Let me give you an example of a really nice bit of writing from the series pilot episode, which shows insight into the human condition:

One of the guys we see get abducted is an American serviceman in the Korean War. When we meet him, he’s not aware that he’s about to be abducted, and with an especially good reason since he has other things to worry about at the moment: He’s getting the snot beat out of him by fellow American servicemen.

Why are they doing that?

A clue is found in the fact that he’s black and they’re white and it’s 1951, just after the integration of the armed forces.

Now the standard, easy thing to do in the writing here would be to chalk the snot kicking incident up to simple, straightforward racism: They’re bigots who view him as sub-human. But that’s not what happens.

Instead, as his fellow servicemen are leaving, one of them turns to the gentleman and says: "We treated you like an equal. . . . But that wasn’t good enough for you."

All of a sudden we’re not in familiar territory anymore. They’re not the kind of simple, unadulterated bigots we were expecting. They were willing to treat him like an equal–or at least they thought they did so.

So what was it that sparked the incident?

We find out when they leave and the serviceman looks at a photograph of himself and his white girlfriend.

Now it all makes sense!

His fellow servicemen are bigots! But they’re not the simple, stereotypical bigots we were expecting. They’re a bunch of "separate but equal" bigots. Their racism isn’t simple, unalloyed hostility towards black people. It’s tempered in a way that makes them and their motives–and the writing of the show–more complex.

And it’s a fully believable moment that shows insight into the human condition: This kind of thing could and did happen in 1951. We have an example of racist evil in this scene, but it shows more subtlety and thus deeper insight into human psychology than the simple, comic book racism we’re used to seeing on screen.

There’s also a nice bit when the serviceman is returned–along with the other 4400–in the present day: As he’s sitting in the detention center with the other returnees, he’s reading a magazine and he exclaims: "What? The Secretary of State is colored!"–at which point another character, abducted years later, walks by and corrects him and says, "Black."

(What would have been even better here is if another abductee then walked by and said, "Afro-American" and then a third walked by and said "African American." That also would have showed the evolving racial situation, but the writers didn’t go in that direction.)

Once he is released from the detention center, the serviceman has culture shock at seeing a genuinely integrated society and as being treated–for real this time–as an equal and one who can cross racial boundaries and isn’t expected to remain separate. But he gets over his culture shock and is able to fit in to 21st century society . . . at least as well as a member of the 4400 can.

That shows you the kind of writing you can expect in the series. It’s more complex than the run-of-the-mill, hackneyed stuff you’d get on most shows of the type, just as Echevarria’s and Behr’s scripts were better and more complex than typical Star Trek stuff. Now that they’re freed from the (amazingly tight) shackles that Star Trek writers were under, they have a chance to spread their wings, and I’m enjoying watching the results.

It’s the same kind of situation as with Battlestar Galactica–where DS9 veteran Ron Moore got the chance to spread his wings.

The second season opener–the only ep I’ve watched so far–has some nice touches as well.

There is, unfortunately, a violent, Fundamentalist zealot in it, but I can accept that since some Fundamentalists would react negatively to the 4400 in real life (and the one in the show is able to cite a verse from Revelation that does sound like the events of the series).

(Also like Battlestar Galactica, there are interesting religious themes in the series, that I’m curious to see how and if the writers will pay off.)

Summer Glau (River from Firefly/Serenity) makes an appearance as a mental patient and does her usual excellent job playing a mentally disturbed young woman.

Jeffrey Coombs (Weyoun from DS9) also has a cameo, which may turn into a regular part. It’s nice to see him without prosthetic makeup.

And an H. P. Lovecraft book plays a significant role at a crucial moment in the plot.

CHECK OUT THE FIRST SEASON.

OR THE SECOND.

SONY hasn’t learned its lesson and has optioned two more of Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon books for sequels to The Da Vinci Code.

The first sequel is the book Angels & Demons (which was actually published to no special fanfare years before The Da Vinci Code), which deals with the Illuminati and their plot against the Catholic Church and . . . are you ready? . . . killing people at the Vatican with antimatter!

Also, the pope has fathered a child out of wedlock with a nun, but to avoid breaking a vow he didn’t have sex with her instead used artificial insemination.

Obviously this pope had a degree in moral theology before becoming pope.

And a degree in canon law. (The vow is to not get married, not to not have sex; the latter is an entailment of not getting married. And it isn’t even a vow in unless he’s a religious; it’s a promise.)

And a real sense of fun. (I mean, he committed a mortal sin to have a child, and he didn’t even commit the enjoyable one.)

MORE INFO HERE.

The next sequel–based on the book Brown is currently writing–is set in America and deals with Freemasons.

MORE ON THE SEQUELS FROM A HOLLYWOOD PERSPECTIVE.

That’s the question I was asking myself thirty minutes into The Da Vinci Code.

Of course, I knew intellectually who the characters were before I stepped into the theater, but the film did next to nothing to tell me who they were and it did absolutely nothing to establish them as presences on screen who I should care about. They’re just emotionally null images who show up and start running around and doing . . . stuff.

Lots of  . . . stuff.

Like . . . y’know . . . driving around in cars backwards in traffic really fast and looking at secret messages written in ink that only shows up in ultraviolet light and talking a lot about symbolism and God and getting shot at repeatedly and . . . and . . .  and the Mona Lisa was in it, too! (For about five seconds.) . . . And there were a couple of churches . . . I think.

Oh! And the movie was set in France! Yes! I definitely remember that! France was in the movie!

The movie was a horrible, horrible mess. I mean, you may have thought that The Big Sleep was hard to follow, but that’s nothing compared to the mess that The Da Vinci Code is. The Big Sleep also has one big advantage over this movie: The Big Sleep is actually interesting.

Not Opie’s latest opus!

Man, is it boring! B-O-R-I-N-G!

Its boringness virtually overwhelmes its offensiveness. I kept yawning audibly through the whole thing.

It fails to establish who the characters are. It fails to establish their motives. It fails to establish why we should care about them. It fails to establish what they’re thinking. It fails to establish how they know what they know. It’s just a huge, sprawling, poorly-communicated mess.

And the overdramatic soundtrack is frequently shrilling overdramatically to tell you that this is a dramatic (!) movie because nothing you’re seeing on the screen is telling you that.

And somebody apparently spiked Richie Cunningham’s drink with a tab of acid, because there’s all these flashbacks and hallucinations and visions interrupting in the middle of sentences every five minutes, like when they’re going to Isaac Newton’s tomb and all of a sudden–for no reason at all, mind you–Mulder and ScullyLangdon and Neveu are suddenly surrounded by all these people from the 18th century, which only the audience (not the characters) can see.

Other film critics have talked about how there is no chemistry between Tom Hanks and the French actress who is in the Agent Scully role, but they’re not telling you the half of it! I mean, these two characters are so emotionally inert that from now on the nuclear waste management agency will be using their relationship to insulate spent uranium rods.

The only time the movie gets a little interesting is when Ian McKellan shows up as a walking anagram who hates the Church and is obsessed with the Holy Grail and injects a bit of humor into the movie.

He gets both of the movie’s intentionally funny lines.

One occurs when he is bluffing his and his manservant’s way past the police by telling them, "I’ve got a medical appointment that I can’t be late for, so if you are really that determined to stop us, you’ll just have to shoot us."

Then he jerks his head toward his manservant and says, "Start with him."

The other intentionally funny line occurs when McKellan has been unmasked as a villain (You weren’t expecting a spoiler-free review, were you?) and as he’s being bundled into a police car, he’s shouting hysterically about Tom Hanks: "That man has a map to the Holy Grail!"

Okay, you kinda have to be there for that one, but in context it was funny, and deliberately so.

That’s not the case with most of the funny lines in the movie. One of the best unintentionally funny lines is when Agent Scully is musing over the fact that Mary Magdalen’s sarcophagus has been moved and she says . . .

<overdramatic petulant French girl voice>The Church, did they finally . . . "get her"?</overdramatic petulant French girl voice>

Or when the Opus Dei cop tells another French cop who is a major character (his boss? his partner? his junior? his peer?) that he got a call from an Opus Dei bishop who told him that he’d just heard the confession of a killer named Fox MulderRobert Langdon and that’s why he’s so fanatically obsessed with catching Tom Hanks.

Some images in the movie are unintentionally funny, too, like when we get a flashback to the Council of Nicaea and it looks like a Renaissance-era, hypercaffeinated high school debate club complete with bleachers.

At what feels like the end of the movie we get a nice moment when Ian McKellan gets bundled off for being a homicidal nut job and you’re thinking, "Whew! Now that that’s over we can all get up and go home!" But NOOOOOOOOOOOO! There’s a whole nother sixteen hours in the movie that we have to sit through!

And in this sixteen hours we go back to the kind of boring, chaotic, poorly-explained, un-Ian-McKellanized . . . stuff . . . that dominated the first act of the film.

Like that conversation near the end of the film (only about three hours before the credits roll) between Mulder and Scully where Mulder is trying to convince her that she shouldn’t be so scientific and that what you believe is what is ultimately important and that if the audience claps its hands really hard then Tinkerbell will come back to life and maybe it’ll destroy or renew the Christian faith if she goes public with the fact that she’s the last surviving descendant of Jesus Christ (Sorry, if you didn’t want spoilers then you should have bailed when I outed Ian McKellan). Only he’s too convoluted for any of this conversation to make sense.

And then Scully ditches Mulder to go off with the secret sex cult that worships her (yeah, okay, I can buy that one) and he goes back to his hotel and starts shaving and he (dum! dum! dum!) cuts himself (hey, they’ve still got three hours before the credits; they have to fill it with something) and (I am not making this up!) he looks at the blood from his shaving nick and gets a VITAL CLUE (which makes no sense) to the location of the tomb of Mary Magdalen (who is buried in the Louvre, it turns out) and he goes out into the night running like a madman and . . . and . . . FAILS to find her tomb!

THE END!

Only it’s supposed to be a moving ending because he’s kneeling and maybe praying–or something–several hundred feet above her tomb, which he can’t see and only guesses is there.

And so the audience is left with bunches of unanswered questions like . . .

Why did Agent Scully decide to suddenly destroy her career as a French police woman for no good reason?

and

Who the heck was the bank manager working for when he decided to try and kill Mulder and Scully for no reason?

and

Did the evil albino who’s a hyper-religious Catholic know that Scully was a descendant of Jesus Christ–as seemed implied–or not–and if he did then why would a hyper-religious Catholic like him want to kill her?

and

Did that evil Opus Dei bishop know that Scully was a descendant of Jesus Christ–as seemed implied–and if so then how did he know it since her name had been changed and her identity masked to keep the Church from knowing that she was still alive? And why would he want to kill a descendant of his Savior?

and

Why did the French Opus Dei cop destroy the very piece of evidence that would have been most useful in a court of law to prove that Robert Langdon was the killer of the museum guy and then ruthlessly hunt him down for murdering the museum guy?

and

How on earth did the murdered museum guy have enough time as he was bleeding to death to strip nekkid and cover himself with ritualistic symbols in blood (and why would he do that, anyway?) and then think up a bunch of puzzles needed to write three secret messages in ultraviolet ink in different parts of the Louvre? And why was he carrying ultraviolet ink around with him to begin with?

and

Why would the museum guy go to all that trouble instead of just writing, "Please tell my granddaughter to go to Rosslyn Chapel and she’ll find a bunch of people who can tell her about her family. She doesn’t need to destroy her career as a cop and go on the lam from the law and put her life in danger repeatedly as she solves a bunch of superfluous puzzles. Honest!"?

and

Why would the museum guy write secret messages in ultraviolet ink on two of Leonardo Da Vinci’s masterpieces, and even if he were going to do that, why didn’t he write the important message on the first masterpiece? Why write an unimportant message on the first masterpiece simply to lead his granddaughter to the second?

and

Didn’t Ron Howard realize that stories about solving puzzles are only fun if the audience has the experience of being able to solve the puzzles with the characters on the screen and that it’s no fun at all if the puzzles are so complex that the audience can’t solve them and only gets to watch the characters on screen repeatedly pulling the answers out of thin air?

and

What’s the point of telling the audience that a particular series of numbers is the Fibonacci series if you don’t tell the audience what the Fibonacci series even is? (I mean, I used to be a math major, so I knew the answer to that one, but it’s still bad filmmaking. Ron Howard was NOT making this movie with me in mind, I can assure you.)

and

At just what point did Ron Howard and Tom Hanks realize that they were giving a huge number of people a really strong disincentive to ever see a Ron Howard or Tom Hanks movie again in the future?

and

Why is the Mona Lisa so important that it’s in all the advertising for this movie, when it shows up for about five seconds and its only significance is that it got vandalized by the museum guy with ultraviolet ink?

and

Why is Leonardo Da Vinci mentioned in like two scenes in this movie when he gets title billing?

and

What the heck is the Da Vinci code, anyway?