Produced by the justly respected team of Robert Halmi Sr. and Robert Halmi Jr., and starring Mira Sorvino as a brilliant archaeologist and martial arts expert, NBC’s miniseries The Last Templar is a likable though fanciful and indeed frequently silly four-hour miniseries about the hunt for an ancient document that could shake the foundations of Christianity if it should come to light.
If that sounds familiar, that’s because of the obvious similarities to The Da Vinci Code, the bestselling novel by Dan Brown and film by Ron Howard. In both Brown’s novel and Howard’s movie, the protagonist’s quest leads to the revelation that Christianity as we know it is a sham invented by the Catholic Church to allow a small group of people to have undue power over the world. According to The Da Vinci Code, Jesus Christ did not die on a cross but instead married Mary Magdalene and had a family, and his descendants are alive today.
That’s all taken from a set of arguments presented by three men in England a couple of decades ago, who outlined this amusingly preposterous theory in a series of charmingly paranoid and apocalyptic books with titles such as Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Brown’s story is more of a jeu d’esprit, albeit badly written and boring, but Christians understandably took great offense to its thesis.
The furor will surely resume this spring as we approach the May 15 release of the film version of Angels and Demons, Brown’s prequel to The Da Vinci Code. However, those who conclude that Brown’s book insults Christianity and spreads lies about their religion should take comfort in the fact that The Last Templar takes a very different perspective on that story line.
After a long, long narrative that jumps from the United States to Turkey and includes more than enough chase scenes and characters mucking about in old ruins, the protagonist, Tess Chaykin (Sorvino), finds the document everyone has been seeking throughout the story. It is a manuscript that has been preserved by the Knights Templar, a secret society, over the centuries, and it purports to be a “gospel” written by Jesus Christ in which he claims to be a mortal human being, not the Son of God as described in the Bible. That, of course, is essentially the same matter at issue in The Da Vinci Code.
The Last Templar‘s treatment of the issue is quite different, however. Upon finding the document, Tess tries to convince her main antagonist, the sinister, aged weirdo William Vance, that no one can ever know whether what the document says is true anyway: a two-millennium-old hoax is still a falsehood regardless of how old it is. That’s a very good point indeed, but Vance remains nonetheless intent on taking the document so that he can use it to “prove” that Christianity is a lot of hooey. His belief is that doing so will put an end to all wars, which he posits are caused solely by religion.
Tess, who started out in the story as an atheist who says she believes only what she can see and God isn’t in that category, has just finished fervently praying for the recovery of her new boyfriend, FBI agent Sean Daly, who is lying in a coma after injuries sustained in a shipwreck (part of the quest, you see). Sean has been portrayed throughout the story as a faithful Catholic and has engaged in several very earnest discussions about religion with Tess, who has satirized and insulted him while he has responded with exceeding reasonableness and kindliness albeit not particularly scintillating theology.
Tess has fallen in love with Sean despite his inadequacy as a theologian, and in her anguish over his dire medical condition–which clearly can be cured only by a huge dose of Hollywood sentimentality and wish-fulfillment–she turns to the only source of miracles she knows; God, of course. Having just done so when confronted by Vance’s arguments for atheism, she desperately tries to convince Vance to give up his quest to destroy all faith in God (which is clearly about as likely as convincing Democrats to give up their addiction to tax dollars).
Alas, Tess’s entreaties are all in vain, and the elderly Vance tries physically to wrest the document from her hands. They struggle over possession of the document atop an exceedingly picturesque but windy bluff overlooking the sea, and not at all surprisingly the pages are soon dislodged from her grasp, caught by the wind, and carried off into the sea below, never to be recovered. “Crap, now we’ll never know!” says Tess’s crestfallen expression.
What’s particularly dizzying about Vance’s arguments, of course, is that they’re ones that have been frequently made by atheists in recent years in attempts to characterize Christianity as not only wrong but in fact nearly as dangerous as the burning of fossil fuels. This gives the miniseries a bit of extra relevance and piquancy, which is probably never a bad thing.
The notion that a secret document disproves the Bible’s claims about Christ’s divinity is clearly not going to sit well with Christians, of course, even when the claim is made in fictional form–as the furor over Brown’s novel proved.
(Those who don’t wish to know the resolution of The Last Templar should skip the next paragraph.)
There’s a final twist, however. Although Tess and the other characters in the story never do find out whether the document is authentic and true (and hence must take their religion on faith, as it were), the audience does get to know the answer. In a flashback to the time when the document was originally hidden, during the Crusades, we find that it is indeed fake, and that it was created for the very same reason as motivated Vance’s crazed quest, the idea that destroying the Christian church would end all wars.
Thus The Last Templar takes the same material as The Da Vinci Code but posits the exact opposite conclusion.
I imagine that quite a few people watched The Last Templar during its initial showings, and that many more will do so over time. In cultural terms, this exchange of views is exactly what Thomas Jefferson said was the great value of freedom of speech (“Notes on Religion,” 1776): “Truth will do well enough if left to shift for herself. . . . She has no need of force to procure entrance into the minds of men.” Thus not only is The Last Templar an interesting antidote for those bothered by The Da Vinci Code, it’s an object lesson for anyone not entirely comfortable with the idea of cultural freedom.
The Last Templar can be viewed online by way of NBC’s Last Templar website.