Your History
I saw Angels & Demons. If anything, it's worse than The Da Vinci Code. But it made me wonder about this kind of film. What kind? Another example would be the National Treasure franchise, where an academic uses his expertise to search for old clues left behind centuries ago to solve a modern-day mystery.
I kind of like the idea of making historians and similar experts cool. There's almost nothing more exciting than studying history, and it's neat to see historians finally be the hero.
Unfortunately, most of the "history" in these movies is nonsensical, and all the clues and imaginary associations responsible for them are ridiculous. Real history is thrilling enough--you don't need to gimmick it up make it exciting.
On the other hand, it's hard to imagine an action movie--or any movie--that spends 90% of the time searching for something in a library.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:18 AM
1 Comments:
Weren't the Indiana Jones movies based on the same premise? Someone tells Indy about a weird discovery, and he pulls a dusty old volume off a shelf of impressive looking books, opens it to a yellowed page with an old drawing on it, and says, "Yes, this is the ancient Mayan artifact that you found!"
Buffy's "Watcher", Giles, does the same thing. "What you are describing is a Turuk-han demon. They haven't appeared since the time of Charlemagne. If you saw two of them digging up a child's grave, then the Nigesh Ascension will happen tomorrow, unless you can stop it!"
Of course, the difference is that Dan Brown appears to take his history seriously....
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