User Reviews

I am being generous giving this thing a "5" but the desert scenes were interesting and I liked the decoder gizmo. The first 10 minutes of this thing were the most ludicrous I have ever seen. After gaping in disbelief I started laughing, then decided to continue watching and see what else they would do, how bad it could get. Eventually I decided that maybe Mira Sorvino's character could have ridden a horse, carrying a golden staff, and "jousted" a 250 lb man in armor off his horse. Mira is a big girl, about 5'10" tall, not skinny, and she looked all through this thing like she never wore makeup and couldn't care less how she looked - she looked terrible, actually. Ther are clues later on that she has had martial arts training, and she pulls quite a few other stunts that suggest one would not want to meet her in a dark alley. So much for the joke.

The crime: the people in this thing do all kinds of things that they shouldn't do, giving archaeology a bad name. I will mention only one. No archaeologist would ever open a flask that had been sealed for 700 years, pull out the scroll she knows is in it, and unroll it, all while sitting on the beach just after finding the flask in a place where she has good reason to believe it had been hidden for 700 years. She could have done irreparable damage to it; it could have crumbled in her fingers. OK, one more. Uncover a buried city, that has not seen the light of day for who knows how long? jump into an underground chamber in it and start crawling around, with your only partner? No way. They could have both been overcome by fumes immediately, and suffocated due to lack of oxygen.

A few more questionable things - the Templars were destroyed by the king of France because he wanted their wealth. Simple as that. He spread all kinds of propaganda about them, justifying his actions, but it was mostly BS. The Church only went along with him, mostly because the pope at the time was a stooge of the French king.

Have traveled extensively Turkey and studied the Crusaders, Arab and Ottoman history. The Ottoman empire did not control Southeast Turkey until mid to late 1300's. Templars in book/movie leave Holyland in 1291, when the Mamelukes besiege Acre. They shipwreck in what is now southern Turkey. The area at this time was nominally under the controlled of the Seljuk Turks. The Small Castle and church, Fonsalis, they find is located in a valley, in the shadow of a volcano. The nearest Volcanoes are located hundreds of miles from the coast on the Anatolian Plateau or on the Kulas Field. Did the Author even read any history of the region and look at geography?

I enjoyed reading Raymond Khoury's novel, except for the ending, which always felt to me like it was added by an insistent editor.

The film version is a major disappointment, for all of the reasons I have read in user comments here and more, including ludicrous dialog, totally inane jumps in logic (digging in the middle of the desert and just immediately finding a buried city), finding the long lost sunken ship in the middle of a horrible storm, and on and on.

But the most offensive deviation from the novel was the part about the Templars having just "invented" the Gospel of Jesus, rather than discovering it in the rubble underneath the Temple in Jerusalem -- and then also turning the character of the older male archaeologist who had been seeking the truth of the Templars into a raving lunatic determined to bring down Christianity. This is the same kind of argument I have found over the years from people who insist that one cannot believe both in God and Evolution --- e.g. that it was not possible for God or a creative force to have created the evolutionary process. Here, the theology is somehow that the transforming message of Jesus is somehow totally irrelevant if one does not believe that Jesus was God, which I find offensive. This was and is the great debate that was central to the struggles in early Christianity between the followers of Peter and the Gnostics, the outcome of which was what determined what gospels made it into the New Testament and which gospels were banned (some of which were discovered in the desert in 1945 or so at Nag Hammadi).

I read the book and was excited at the prospect of a movie. Within the first 10 minutes I was rolling my eyes. My kids (who had not read the book) were trying to follow it out and couldn't because too many things made little or no sense. Her mother & daughter were written out of the museum gathering, I suppose to allow her to go galloping after the horsemen. If you read the book, you'll hate the movie. The book is completely butchered in such a way that it is hard to make heads or tails out of the storyline. The acting is poor. The re-write on the main character makes very little sense. They went from a well written and quite believable character to an airhead who is quite concerned about her expensive designer shoes, and completely unbelievable as ever having been a field archaeologist. I would give this one a 0 out of 10 if that were a choice.

"The Last Templar" is a fascinating miniseries about the quest for the treasure of the Knights Templar. Mira Sorvino successfully leads the cast as a archaeologist who tracks the clues to the place where a legendary document that could shake the foundations of Christianity remains. The program does a good job of not becoming too controversial. The acting makes up for the program's occasionally slow pace and clichéd storytelling. The film even features some fine visual effects for a television miniseries, and Omar Sharif makes a memorable cameo appearance in the film's emotionally-charged climax that will leave viewers fascinated. It's definitely worth watching if you enjoy adventure stories. Grade: B

if i meet the director of this film,first i ask that did he come to Bodrum,turkey.in this film Bodrum was showed as a desert in an Arab country.there are some camels in Bodrum?.Wow,i went there but i couldn't see any camels.i can send Bodrum's real pictures to the director of this film or he can find real Bodrum like writing Bodrum on Google.Every year;lots of actors and actresses come to Turkey especially Bodrum and Antalya.Are they crazy? They are not.I am a Turkish guy and i can not believe that these pictures belong to Bodrum.Secondly,in the casting of this film,why the old Turkish man is not Turkish? he is an Arab.if the creator of this film can find any camels,deserts or people who can not speak Turkish although they are Turkish(!)in Turkey,i will apologize.we can not blame all American people for this film but it hurts me and all Turkish people.PLEASE RESPECT US.we are not Iraq.we are not Syria.we are not Iran.we are not Arab countries.please come to Istanbul,Bodrum and Antalya and see the reality.thanks