In The Da Vinci Code they aided the concealment of Mary Magdelene as the Holy Grail. In National Treasure they hid a shit load of treasure. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade they were also involved with the Holy Grail, but in Universal’s The Knights Templar they take it to a whole new level.
This time around, fresh from the Crusades, the Knights Templar will be forced to fend off an invading vampire army set on destroying the Holy Grail. Now that sounds interesting if you ask me and luckily Russian helmer Timur Bekmambetov is only producing and not directing since he seems to take films and turn them into visual spectacles rather than cohesive stories. Don’t get me wrong, I am anxious to see Wanted, but Night Watch was an insufferable bore to the point that I still haven’t taken the time to hit the play button on Day Watch.
The new twist on the tale of the Middle Age knights was spun by Adam Torchia and Justin Stanley. Both are relatively green with Torchia not having a script to his name (he’s a 10-year veteran of Universal’s story department) and Stanley was a writer on the low-budget films Beneath Loch Ness and The Shadow Men with a spec-script called Witchfinders in development at Regency.
I absolutely love anything that takes a popular religious theme and twists it into something original. It’s the reason I was fascinated by The Golden Compass, loved Constantine and am still wildly curious about just what the hell is going on in There Will Be Blood.
While I don’t claim any religion as my own I am relatively familiar with the stories in the Bible and they run very deep and when the right mind gets hold of a good story and infuses it with religion it gets that much better.
However, I will say that Dan Brown should never be allowed to touch the idea again after “The Da Vinci Code”, which was a paint-by-numbers novel that tricked folks into thinking it was real and then went on to takeover the world. I’ll admit “Angels & Demons” is a pretty good read, but I will never forgive myself for reading even half of “Da Vinci.” Wow was that an awful book.
