A beloved pope passes. Subatomic particles collide. Influential priests vanish. An ancient adversary of the Catholic Church reemerges. And one cryptic word ties it all together: Illuminati. Such is the stuff of Angels & Demons, the big-screen sequel to 2006's The Da Vinci Code.
 Swept into the center of the ominous intrigue that engulfs the Vatican is renowned symbologist Robert Langdon. Though there's no love lost between the skeptical Harvard scholar and Catholic Church officials, he's the man they call when four cardinals, all top-ranking candidates for the now vacant Holy See, go missing.
The perpetrators, if a cryptic note left behind is to be believed, are agents of the Illuminati, a shadowy underground brotherhood bent on retribution for the Church's persecution of scientists four centuries before. The Illuminati's endgame is nothing short of the decimation of Roman Catholicism itself, a plan to be achieved by detonating a pilfered container of powerful antimatter engineered by nuclear physicists in Switzerland. In other words, using a cutting edge scientific advancement to level a religious organization with a long history of suppressing scientific advancement.
Racing against time to save the cardinals and the Vatican itself, Langdon finds allies in Italian physicist Vittoria Vetra and the man entrusted with the papal office's administrative authority between pontiffs, an earnest young priest named Patrick McKenna. But as Langdon and Co. uncover clues, search crypts and dodge bullets, the chilling extent to which evil has infiltrated the Church becomes ever more clear.
:: Review
Against the majestic backdrop of Rome's ancient cathedrals and spiritual spaces, an agnostic researcher races to save a Church he doesn't much believe in ... but a Church that absolutely needs him. It's a premise full of paradox. And ripe, it might seem, for controversy. And it may still create some. But what director Ron Howard (who also helmed The Da Vinci Code) throws moviegoers here is something of a curveball.
Angels & Demons is drenched in religious imagery and deals with significant spiritual subjects. At the fore is this question: Can science and religion coexist peacefully, or is their relationship doomed to be forever marred by retributive rancor? The Church, we're told, hasn't always gotten this important question right ... with horrific consequences.
Instead of relentlessly asserting that the Roman Catholic tradition is impervious to change, though, Howard generally portrays its leaders as men who try to take responsibility for past wrongs. They're not perfect. But, to their credit, they don't claim to be. The film's answer to that question of science and faith? The two needn't be mutually exclusive. Instead, both have their place in the lives of billions of people trying to make sense of the world around them. And, above all, violent responses to philosophical and spiritual differences should stay where they belong: in the past.
Responding to the film, reviewers at the official Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, offered only mild criticism of historical inaccuracies, and generally characterized Angels & Demons as "more than two hours of harmless entertainment, which hardly affects the genius and mystery of Christianity." They even noted, "This time, the church is on the side of the good guys."
It's not that simple, of course. It never is. After all, the Church ends up deliberately deceiving the world as the film ends by covering up significant events. But the net result still feels less like the religious treatise (or thinly veiled propaganda statement) that the last adaptation of a Dan Brown novel, The Da Vinci Code, was, and more like an overly spiritualized (and violent) mash-up of National Treasure, Raiders of the Lost Ark, CSI and 24.
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