Angels and Demons

Take me down to Vatican City where the streets are explosive and the victims are Preferiti.

So when the Catholic Church is being threatened by an ancient and secretive society, they don't call in secret agents, special forces or even Bibleman (a mortal man who is imbued with holy powers thanks to the love of the Lord) - nope... they get in a guy who is good at crosswords and sudoku.

When Richard Whiteley died it was a genuinely sad moment. It wasn't like the horror show of Jade Goody's slow death or Kerry Katona's bizarre suicide (be patient), but something poignant and sincerely moving.

You see, even if you didn't watch Countdown on a regular basis, you were still aware of who Whiteley was and what he was about. He hosted Countdown for years and he was everything good about TV: inoffensive, charming, self-effacing and sincere. His slightly bumbling demeanour was a nice relaxing change in pace to annoying brattish children's TV presenters (or children's TV shouters) which is funny in itself because he was actually a rather intelligent man. When he died, it wasn't in a blaze of media attention and "Exclamat!on! Mark! Magaz!ne!" headlines. He got ill and he died. Genuinely moving.

Countdown was never the same after his death and they've since tried re-branding the show but it just doesn't feel right. The only good thing about it is Suzie Dent is still there all smart and minxy. Yeah, you know what I mean, there's just something about her... grr. I heard that at some point, they were thinking of revamping the format and instead of having a couple of contestants going head to head, they have a couple of contestants going up against a Countdown Champion - basically a super geek who is nigh unbeatable in both words and numbers.

Now obviously THAT is a situation where you would send out the emergency calls for someone like Robert Langdon. NOT when a secret society called the Illuminati are attempting to overthrow the Catholic Church by proving that science and God can exist in the same place and time; whereas the Catholic Church believes that sort of thinking is utter nonsense and if science and religion mix it will be like in TimeCop and the world will go all blobby and implode or something.

Anyway, the Illuminati threaten to do this by using antimatter - presumably similar to the Red Matter stuff they use in Star Trek (What is it with JJ Abrams and big red balls?) and for a huge invasive top secret society, they sure do like to leave a lot of clues laying around for people to look at and decipher - for 'decipher' see 'turn upside down and read it that way instead' - it's almost like the top secret ancient underground society WANT to be found out... hmm...

I won't spoil the super-secret-surprise-twist ending for you because you will enjoy working it out for yourselves about 15 minutes into the start of the film.