Who is da vinci code

The Secret Life of Leonardo da Vinci A prankster and genius, Leonardo da Vinci is widely believed to have hidden secret messages within much of his artwork. An Unbroken Code There exists a chapel in Great Britain that contains a ceiling from which hundreds of stone blocks protrude, jutting down to form a bizarre multi-faceted surface.

Each block is carved with a symbol, seemingly at random, creating a cipher of unfathomable proportion. Modern cryptographers have never been able to break this code, and a generous reward is offered to anyone who can decipher the baffling message. In recent years, geological ultrasounds have revealed the startling presence of an enormous subterranean vault hidden beneath the chapel.

To this day, the curators of the chapel have permitted no excavation. Someone is watching you… or are they? The Louvre Museum in Paris is one of the longest buildings on Earth. Todd Hallowell Executive Producer. Hans Zimmer Composer. Salvatore Totino Cinematographer. Dan Hanley Film Editor. Mike Hill Film Editor. Janet Hirshenson Casting. John Hubbard Casting. Jane Jenkins Casting.

Allan Cameron Production Design. Giles Masters Art Direction. Richard Roberts Set Decoration. Daniel Orlandi Costume Designer. View All Critic Reviews Oct 29, The Da Vinci Code has been and released to incredible box office appeal. I missed the train of when this book was hugely popular and the world was talking about Dan Brown endlessly.

I found it interesting they ignored Angels and Demons as the first entry and created Da Vinci Code as the origin story-line. My first reactions to this film will be quite negative as the long running time and convenient style twists and turns don't hold up.

I've read Angels and Demons so my initial issue was the central casting of Tom Hanks. The actor is no slouch but I felt he was miscast in the central role. The issue with Hanks might even be the films screenplay, which relies too heavily on suspension of disbelief.

How many characters are connected to this massive conspiracy? The book works better in this story-line style due to the nature of airport fiction in general, but the screenplay doesn't distinguish itself enough and the long running time is too much.

I enjoyed the ending and Zimmer's wonderful film score during that conclusion. Ron Howard wouldn't have been my first choice and his team-up with Akiva Goldsman lacks a coherent story. There was opportunity but sadly I found this tiresome and muddled. I'm going to view the next films due to myself checking out the books in comparison, so look out for my next reviews. Brendan O Super Reviewer. Dec 28, Based off the best selling novel by Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code garnered a good deal of controversy upon its theatrical release as it did when the book was first published.

The Catholic church in particular took great offense to the idea of Mary being Jesus' wife and the idea they had children together. The film presents them as such empirical truths and with such manner of fact that it just rubs anyone with differing beliefs the wrong way.

Still, if you can understand it's a work of fiction and leave it at that, you should be able to get past this and simply take it as a fictional work. While the book itself overcame it's controversial origins and became a best seller with critical reviews mostly positive, the dulled down scripted theatrical remake has done the exact opposite. The script and dialogue is lazily written and everything is spelled out for the viewer bit by bit and with nothing left to the viewer's imagination.

You basically can't even put together your own theories because one of the characters is quickly telling you exactly what is what throughout the film. The theatrical version is around two and a half hours with the extended version just shy of three hours, and this certainly doesn't help the matter.

The whole film just barely trudges along and really drags throughout the film's overlong running time with Tom Hanks and Ian McKellen delivering the only positive thing, their acting. There are a few action sequences scattered throughout but they are lackluster at best and never really get exciting or give the viewer any really sense of danger and dread like better thriller films do.

Like most other literary adaptations, The Da Vinci Code just doesn't live up to the book and was hastily put together without any real care given to it, despite it's talent. Director Ron Howard is also a very hit or miss director and this is certainly not among his best works, such as Cinderella Man or A Beautiful Mind.

What is frustrating here is the potential and the talent involved and yet we come away with a mediocre film that fails to deliver a grand scope and thought provoking story. As a rental, it should keep first time viewers interested enough to not doze off, but for repeat viewings it can be a real slog to get through.

Chris B Super Reviewer. Aug 06, Film adaptations of bestselling books are very often rushed, sub-par affairs. When a book becomes a bestseller, being widely advertised and talked about everywhere, the pressure is often on to make the film quickly, before the hype begins to fade and chances of a big opening weekend are dashed.

Directors often react to this tight tournaround by slavishly reproducing on screen the words that are on the page, resulting in works like One Day and the first two Harry Potter films which don't use cinematic storytelling effectively to justify their stories outside of their hype. You'd like to think that Ron Howard, one of the most successful and populist directors around, wouldn't fall into this trap.

He is, after all, the man who produced a cracking drama in Apollo 13 despite sticking rigidly to the in-flight transcripts of the Apollo crew. Having turned his talents to subjects as varied as mermaids, firemen and mathematics, you wouldn't bet against him being a dab hand at the theological thriller.

But whatever the appeal of its source material, The Da Vinci Code is a total clunker. Play trailer Mystery Thriller. Director Ron Howard. Akiva Goldsman screenplay Dan Brown novel. Top credits Director Ron Howard. See more at IMDbPro. Trailer The Da Vinci Code. Clip Video Photos Top cast Edit. Paul Bettany Silas as Silas. Etienne Chicot Lt. Collet as Lt. Francesco Carnelutti Prefect as Prefect. Seth Gabel Michael as Michael. Ron Howard. More like this.

Watch options. It all points, he says, towards a cataclysmic possibility. Leigh: That there were progeny or at least one child from this union and that a bloodline continued. Could these cryptic documents reveal some ancient knowledge and could they hold the key to finding the heirs of Jesus living among us today? In the book, they are startling truths that have been protected and passed down through the ages by the members of an elite secret society called the Priory of Sion.

But does the Priory of Sion exist? A similar story was first told in in a non fiction book called "Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

To separate fact from fiction in both books, you have to understand the true story at the heart of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," one that began more than a years ago, in a tiny village in the south of France called Rennes le Chateau. It all centers around a man named Sauniere. But soon after he began renovating a church, all of that changed. He became rich, which left many in town wondering how he came by his fortune and what secrets it might hold Local legend has it Sauniere found some mysterious documents hidden deep in the church's altar.

Lincoln: The priest, in repairing his church, supposedly found some parchments. These parchments contained secret messages. Secret messages, it was said, that led the priest to a buried treasure. But when the authors of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" analyzed the parchments, they came up with a different theory: Sauniere had stumbled onto not gold and jewels, but evidence of a secret society that had been guarding the descendents of Jesus and Mary Magdalene for centuries.

The clues, they say, are there in the parchments. To find out more about the Priory, the authors headed to the French National Library, and soon, made another discovery, a list of Priory leaders, or grand masters. Leigh: We checked all of these, even those that seemed irrelevant to the main story, and they all checked out. But that wasn't all. The same files contained papers filled with elaborate family trees, genealogies and codes that seemed to directly tie a line of French kings and queens to the descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

Leigh: If we read the clues they provided correctly they claim, one, Jesus was married. At some point subsequent to the crucifixion Jesus' wife or widow, as the case, might be escaped either pregnant or with child to the South of France. Around AD this blood line supposedly intermarries with the royal line of the Francs. Could this radical -- even sacrilegious -- story be the real secret the priest stumbled onto all those years ago? And did he use that knowledge to extort money from someone, the Church perhaps, to keep silent?

The authors followed the documents further and it wasn't long before those family trees led them to the doorstep of an eccentric Frenchman named Pierre Plantard. Plantard was the soft-spoken son of a butler and a cook, who'd lived an unremarkable life as a low ranking government paper-pusher. But when the authors interviewed Plantard, a grander story emerged. Plantard said that the Priory of Sion was real and that he was a member. Leigh: When we first established contact with members of Priory, Plantard was their official spokesman.

Lincoln:Plantard: At this moment Priory of Sion still exists. Lincoln: Monsieur Plantard, you have supported the Priory of Sion. Plantard: We have supported Sion and Sion has supported us. Lincoln: We? Who are we? Plantard: We. I am speaking of the Merovingian line. The same royal line described on the family trees— which raised the possibility that Plantard wasn't just a member of the priory, but also perhaps, a descendant of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

And in , they laid out the following theory in their non-fiction book: The Priory of Sion was a real organization that had been protecting the untold story of Jesus, Mary and their French descendants for centuries. Archeologist Bill Putnam is one of several scholars, historians, and journalists who have called The Priory of Sion nothing more than a modern-day con.

By comparing the Priory documents to other paperwork, Putnam concluded that the grand master list, the family trees, the secret "Sion" and "PS" codes were all a hoax, fabricated by none other than Pierre Plantard. Putnam: He's a very strange man. He's a very strange man. One might call him a fantasy worker. Putnam says the deception began when Plantard heard legends about the French priest and his unexplained wealth and decided to fabricate coded parchments that would appear to explain the mystery of the priest's fortune.

Putnam: He creates a body called the Priory of Sion and argues that this had been in existence for 1, years. Next, Putnam says, Plantard planted the list of priory grand masters and those family trees linking him to French royalty in the French National Library.

Pierre Plantard died in And if you're wondering how that priest, Sauniere, amassed that mysterious fortune, it had nothing to do with unearthing secrets about the Holy Grail. It turns out he was accused of selling mail-order prayer services for the dead -- a scandal that got him suspended from the pulpit. It appears all other explanations for the mystery are simply fiction. Unless, of course, like some true believers, you think the fake documents, the Sauniere mystery, and Plantard's story are just another smokescreen.

Perhaps the Priory of Sion has managed, once again, to avoid detection— still carefully guarding its holy secret about Mary Magdalene.

Worshipers there for Good Friday services heard a sermon condemning the book. It was an extraordinary reaction to a secular work of art and not the only response from church leaders. Last month in Genoa, an Italian Cardinal told Catholics not to buy the novel, calling it, "a sack full of lies against the Church.

Aspects of the organization are painted as secretive and ruthless, portrayals that Opus Dei members and many Catholics say is flat out wrong.

Stone Phillips, Dateline correspondent: No Albino monk hit men? Father Williams: I haven't met one yet I know members of Opus Dei who are wonderful very good normal people, believing Christians, wonderful members of society.

And I think they have been hurt by this. Phillips: I guess if you're inclined to be suspicious of an institution like the church this is certainly going to feed that. Father Williams: It is a mysterious institution. You can fit a lot in there.