Angels and Demons.

First, a confession. I never read the book, and I'm not a big fan. So I'm a lot less fussy about what is likely to be at most one of three or four movies than I am about Star Trek. Damn it Jim, I'm a Trekkie, not a symbolist!

I enjoyed Angels and Demons a lot. Happily, I never saw the plot twist coming, in spite of thinking it odd that people just shot the head of the Swiss Guards without giving him a chance to drop his weapon. I thought the critics were wrong in most of what they said. For example, I heard and read that the physics was idiotic. This only showed that the critics are unfamiliar with The Standard Model, which has formed the basics of particle physics since the 1970s. The great search for the god particle is real... it' the Higgs boson. It's not "Angels and Demons" that has particle physics wrong, it's the movie critics.

That said, Angels and Demons, while head and shoulders above The DaVinci Code in it's understanding of the Roman Catholic Church, is still infested by misguided notions about the relationship between the Church and scientific truth. the Roman Catholic Church is not against science, it just thinks that fertilized eggs are people, and you shouldn't kill people. Even 400 years ago Galileo didn't really get into trouble until he published a popular pamphlet in which the guy who stated the Pope's position was called "The Idiot." The insistence by atheists that since the Church punished Galileo 400 years ago (and more for insulting the Church than for disagreeing with it), the Church opposes science is, to paraphrase Galileo, idiotic.

And before you conclude I'm blogging for the Church, I'm not even a Christian. I just don't feel the need to insult Christians without cause or basis. I don't believe a fertilized egg has a soul. The traditional time a soul enters the body, for most of the last 2000 years, was at quickening. I see no reason to change that belief. However, that disagreement does not blind me to the fact that the Church believes it is saving lives, not stopping science. In Angels and Demons, cardinals and bishops that support science are identified as 'liberal'. In fact, this is not a matter of dispute in the Church. At least those in the Church that supported truth was shown to win in this film.

In sum, Movie good, critics bad.