Summoned by Vatican authorities still annoyed at his exposure of ancient church secrets, Langdon (Tom Hanks) teams with brainy Bond girl - make that fetching particle physicist - Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer) on a semiotic scavenger hunt through Rome to find imperiled cardinals and save an imperiled church.
The pope is dead, and the College of Cardinals is meeting to name his successor as four likely candidates are abducted. They will be killed on the hour from 8 to 11 p.m. Then their captor will unleash antimatter at midnight, rocking the Vatican to its foundations. The captor claims to be part of a sect of scientists belatedly avenging the papal persecution of Galileo (branded a heretic in 1615 for hypothesizing that the Earth revolved around the sun).
In a gruesome robbery, the abductor has stolen the antimatter from the Supercollider in Geneva, drawing a new battle line in the war of those historic adversaries, Faith and Science. If science claims creation, what is left to God? If God created man, how does the church explain evolution?
And is antimatter really stored in a vacuum tube and kept stable by what looks to be a laptop battery?
As Howard frames it, the threat of the Supercollision between physics and faith establishes a palpable tension.
Still, Howard's fluid camera movement, Salvatore Totino's old master-ly cinematography, and the Gregorian rants of Hans Zimmer's score cannot redeem the Hardy Boys plotting of Dan Brown's source material. Hanks, Zurer, Armin Mueller-Stahl (as an old-guard cardinal), Stellan Skarsgård (as chief of the Vatican's Swiss Guards), and Ewan McGregor (as the dead pope's exalted personal assistant) deserve points for earnest recitations of the often-stilted dialogue.
