Angels and Demons

Thriller, Adaptation, Politics/Religion and Sequel

May 15th, 2009

Rated: PG-13 for sequences of violence, disturbing images and thematic material.
STARRING
Tom Hanks, Ewan McGregor, Ayelet Zurer, Stellan Skarsgard, Pierfrancesco Favino, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, and
Armin Mueller-Stahl

The Ring of the Fisherman, which bears the official papal seal
must be destroyed immediately following the pope’s death.
The papal apartment is then sealed for nine days of mourning
a period known as sede vacante:
The time of the empty throne.
Over the last several days
Catholic leaders from every corner of the world
have flocked to Rome shocked by the sudden death
of this progressive and beloved pope.
Today, in St. Peter’s Square
the faithful pray that there is among them
another leader who can unite their Church
which has been so riven by change and dissent in recent years.
As the body of the pontiff passes by
we see prayers are being offered by the preferiti
favorites among those being considered
to succeed him as the Vicar of Christ.
At the end of the mourning period, the College of Cardinals
will lock itself behind the doors of the Sistine Chapel for conclave
the process by which they will choose a new leader…
for the world’s one billion Catholics
who now find their Church at a crossroads
its ancient traditions threatened by a modern world.
Attention, control group going online for LHC beam event.
We are powering up.
Attention, Category one personnel:
Interlock areas are now restricted.
You pulled us off the power grid, Philippe.
Because you’re scaring the hell out of everyone.
The collider was never intended to generate antimatter.
All three canisters are stored under every possible safeguard.
I’m only asking you to wait.
We can’t wait. The bulk of the antimatter is generated at start-up.
Put us back online.
Do you want to call the director, or shall I?
ATLAS underground is now in restricted mode.
Vittoria, Vittoria.
Protons are being loaded.
Don’t blow us all to heaven.
Please.
Powering on LHC magnets.
lon source stage in four three, two.
We are powering up. Here we go.
Start the collision sequence.
Vittoria what did Philippe want?
They’re terrified. He wants us to wait. What do you think?
I think if we don’t harvest now, we never will.
Beam-on-beam stability is good. Take your places, people.
ATLAS at CMS check.
Sending timing trigger now. Collisions imminent.
We have got 10 to the 13th protons per bunch.
Let’s hope the heavy ion guys didn’t mess up.
Beams at relativistic velocities.
Luminosity monitors operational.
Beamline has no restrictions.
Enable beam capture.
Accelerating the beam.
Stage one, line up.
Magnets to full field.
Load functions to magnets.
Last P is still too high.
Yeah, we got luminosity of 10 to 34.
Inject particle beams.
Filling the LHC.
Collisions are active. We should be back online.
Capture should begin at any moment.
Particles in transition.
Collisions are fixed and running.
LHC injecting protons, beam one.
Lock the feedback systems.
Particles at 99 percent the speed of light.
Colliding stable beams.
Enact injection kicker.
We have a signal on the luminosity monitors.
We have events.
Protons are moving.
We have antimatter.
It’s on a scale never seen before.
That’s a crate of beer on the way.
Silvano we’ve done it.
We’re in God’s hands now, Vittoria.
I’ll be right down.
Silvano.
Oh, God.
Help!
A swim might help your jet lag.
I beg your pardon?
You got bags under your eyes. It’s 5 in the morning.
And you’re from the Vatican.
Crossed keys under the triregnum.
It’s a papal symbol.
Claudio Vincenzi, Corpo della Gendarmeria Vaticano.
Vatican police?
I was expecting another letter.
My request for access to your archives.
Shouldn’t you be in Rome?
A kind of busy time for you guys, isn’t it?
In fact, I was in New York, detailed to the U.N.
I receive a phone call in the middle of the night:
“Find Professor Robert Langdon.
A matter of great urgency.”
They said to show you this.
The Illuminati? They disappeared hundreds of years ago.
Did they? Look at that again.
It’s an ambigram.
It’s the same image forward and backward.
Now, that’s common for a symbol, like a yin and yang or a swastika…
but that’s a word.
That Illuminati ambigramatic symbol…
has been considered a myth for 400 years.
Supposedly, in the 16th century
some artist created it as a tribute to Galileo’s love of symmetry.
It was only gonna be revealed
when the Illuminati had amassed enough power
to resurface and carry out their final goal.
I wrote a book about it.
Which is why you’re here.
The Art of the Illuminati by Robert Langdon.
Part one.
Haven’t been able to finish Part Two. I’m not allowed access
to your archives.
It’s remarkable. Singular.
Someone is trying to make you believe
the Illuminati themselves have returned to Rome.
Right after the death of a pope.
Four cardinals were kidnapped from inside the Vatican
sometime between 3 and 5 am. This morning.
Shortly afterward
that document was sent to the office of the Swiss Guard
along with the threat the cardinals will be publicly executed…
one per hour, beginning at 8 pm. Tonight in Rome.
- Conclave. – Was to begin today.
We’ve postponed its start for a few hours, a story of illness.
There are no suspicions yet.
What do you want from me?
These criminals who sent this ambigram
meant it as a taunt, a provocation.
But Captain Olivetti think if you can use it to learn their identity…
perhaps we can stop this abomination.
Why me?
Your expertise. Your erudition.
Your recent involvement with certain Church, shall we say
mysteries.
I wasn’t under the impression that episode
had endeared me to the Vatican.
Oh, it didn’t.
But it did make you… What’s the word?
Formidabile.
Formidable.
A Vatican jet is standing by 20 minutes from here.
Will you come with me?
Professore Langdon, you’ve spent your life
searching for symbols like the one you now hold in your hand.
How much longer are we going to pretend
you have not already decided to come?
If the Illuminati have returned and are in Rome…
we will hunt them down and kill them.
The Illuminati did not become violent
until the 17th century. Their name means “the enlightened ones”
They were physicists and mathematicians, astronomers.
They were concerned with the Church’s inaccurate teaching
and were dedicated to scientific truth.
But the Vatican didn’t like that.
So the Church began to… How did you say it?
Oh, “hunt them down and kill them”
Drove them underground.
Into a secret society.
Excuse me.
Comandante Richter assures me the guard
is doing everything humanly possible to find the preferiti.
A long way to say very little.
What if you were to begin in their absence?
They are the four leading candidates.
If they’re not present, they’re not eligible.
There will be no consensus without them. Who are we to vote for?
It is as much a sin to offer flattery as to accept it.
May I suggest you at least consider the possibility.
No, no, no. There is no possibility.
I have been chosen Great Elector. I am not eligible.
Camerlengo asks how long we can postpone the opening prayer
without making another announcement to the public.
Tell the camerlengo the cardinal-elect will take every minute required
to perform the sacred trust.
No further announcements are necessary.
He’ll be concerned about the public dimension.
- People will think… – What we tell them to think.
- Professor Langdon. – Yes.
Welcome to Vatican City.
Ernesto Olivetti, inspector general of the Vatican police force.
- My pleasure. – This way, please.
We’ll meet in the headquarters of the Swiss Guard.
I thought you were Swiss Guard.
No, la Gendarmeria.
We are responsible for everything inside the Vatican walls
with the exception of the security of His Holiness…
- Yeah. – And the Apostolic Palace.
That is Swiss Guard.
The Roman carabinieri are here as well in an advisory capacity.
So jurisdictionally, this is.
A goddamn nightmare.
Oh, yes, Pope Pius IX’s great castration.
- I beg your pardon? – 1857, Pope Pius IX
felt the male form would inspire lust.
So he took a hammer and chisel
and unmanned hundreds of these statues.
The plaster fig leaves were added later.
Are you anti-Catholic, Professor Langdon?
No. I’m anti-vandalism.
I urge you to guard your tone here.
The Swiss Guard is a calling, not a profession
and it encourages a certain zealotry.
Commander Richter, the head of the Guard
is a deeply spiritual man
and he was close to the late pope. Understood?
Look, I don’t study symbols because I consider them unimportant.
Ceremony, traditions, it’s how we mark our lives.
I just… I just hope I can help.
So do I.
You were my idea.
Wait here. Please.
Commander?
Commander Richter?
Professor Langdon is here.
Well, we have bigger problems than that now.
Dr. Vetra?
I’m Commander Richter, comandante principale of the Swiss Guard.
Thank you for coming.
Hello.
- Professor Langdon. – Yes.
What a relief, the symbologist is here.
This way, please, Miss Vetra.
The situation has changed.
We received another threat from the kidnapper.
The canister was stolen from our lab around noon yesterday.
The intruder killed my research partner, Silvano Bentivoglio
and mutilated him in order to bypass security.
We use retinal scanners.
They cut out his eye.
Is that your stolen canister, Miss Vetra?
Where is that camera, Number 86?
It’s wireless. It too was stolen.
It could be anywhere inside the Vatican.
That canister contains an extremely combustible substance.
We need to locate it immediately or evacuate Vatican City.
I’m quite familiar with incendiaries, Miss Vetra.
I’ve never heard of antimatter being used as such.
Well, it’s never been generated in significant quantities before.
It’s a way of studying the origins of the universe…
to try to isolate what some people call “the God particle”
But there are implications for energy research…
“The God particle”?
What we call it isn’t important.
It’s what gives all matter mass.
The thing without which we could not exist.
You’re talking about the moment of creation.
Yes. In a way, I am.
The antimatter is suspended there…
in an airtight nanocomposite shell with electromagnets in each end.
If it were to fall out of suspension and come in contact with matter…
say, the bottom of the canister, the two opposing forces
would annihilate one another violently.
And what might cause it to fall out of suspension?
The battery going dead.
- Which it will, just before midnight. – What kind of annihilation?
- How violent? – A cataclysmic event.
A blinding explosion equivalent to about five kilotons.
Vatican City will be consumed by light.
Those are the exact words the kidnapper used.
We will destroy your four pillars.
We will brand your preferiti
and sacrifice them on the altars of science
then bring your church down upon you.
Vatican City will be consumed by light.
A shining star at the end of the Path of Illumination.
It’s the ancient Illuminati threat.
Destruction of Vatican City through light.
Four pillars, there’s your kidnapped cardinals.
You didn’t tell me they were the preferiti, the favorites
to be named the next pope.
Play it again.
We will destroy your four pillars.
We will brand your preferiti…
Wait, stop it. Stop it.
“Brand” them.
That’s another Illuminati legend.
This one says that there are a set of five brands
each one an ambigram.
The first four are the fundamental elements of science:
Earth, air, fire and water.
The fifth, it’s a mystery.
Maybe it’s this.
He said they’d be killed publicly.
Yes.
Revenge for la purga.
“La purga”?
Oh, jeez, you guys don’t even read your own history, do you?
1668, the Church kidnapped four Illuminati scientists
and branded each one of them on the chest
with the symbol of the cross
to purge them of their sins, and they executed them.
Threw their bodies into the street as a warning
to others to stop questioning Church rulings on scientific matters.
They radicalized them.
The purga created a darker, more violent Illuminati
one bent on retribution.
Look how they intend to finally get it:
Using antimatter, technology, to destroy the Church.
Science obliterates religion.
Is there any more?
- And sacrifice them on the altars of science
then bring your church down upon you.
Vatican City will be consumed by light.
A shining star at the end of the Path of Illumination.
“Path of Illumination”
I need access to the Vatican archives.
Professor, I don’t think this is the appropriate…
Your petition has been denied seven times.
No, no. This has nothing to do with my work. The Path of Illumination
is a trail that leads to the Church of the Illumination
the place where the Illuminati would meet in secret.
If I can find the segno, the sign
that marks the beginning of that path, the four churches along it
may be where he intends to murder your cardinals.
One every hour at 8, 9, 10 and 11.
Then the device explodes at midnight.
If we can figure out the first church and get there before he does
maybe we can stop it. But I can’t find the start of the path
until I get into the archives.
Even if I wanted to help you
access to the archives is only by written decree
by the curator and the Board of Vatican Librarians.
Or by papal mandate.
Yes, but as you no doubt have heard, the Holy Father is dead.
What about il camerlengo?
The camerlengo is just a priest here, the former pope’s chamberlain.
Doesn’t the power of the Holy See rest in him during tempe sede vacante?
Fellas, you called me.
His Holiness once told me a pope
was a man torn between the real world and the divine.
It seems the real world is upon us tonight.
I’m familiar with Illuminati lore and the legend of the brandings.
La purga is a dark stain on this Church’s history.