It's not even Friday yet, but already the good folks at Sony Pictures are rewarding us for a long work week. Sony released the teaser trailer this morning for Angels & Demons, the followup to Dan Brown's highly successful book/movie The Da Vinci Code.
At first glance, the biggest improvement over the original movie is the subtraction of star Tom Hanks' mullet which was a major distraction in The Da Vinci Code. Also in this trailer is the first glance of Ewan McGregor as Carlo Ventresca, the Camerlengo of the Vatican Church.
You can view a high quality version on the movie's official site or simply watch the YouTube version below.
Angels & Demons will debut in theaters on May 15, 2009.
UPDATE: I wish I could say that all those years of squinting frame by frame at Lost gave me the skills to find this all by myself, but sadly I can't take credit for this. A little birdie gave me a nudge and the rest is below.
Hidden in the trailer is an ambigram (reads the same thing upside down as upside right) of Illuminati that also figures heavily in the plot of the book/movie. Digging a little deeper, there's actually a hidden message in the letters of the ambigram.
Yeah, I missed it the first dozen times I watched it too. However, with a little contrast and level adjustment in Photoshop, the words "Altars of Science" is clearly visible. Try this one.
In the book/movie, the "Altars of Science" is a fictional plot device in which four locations represent the four elements and lay out the "Path of the Illuminati." Because we live in an Internet society, the natural inclination is to append a ".com" on everything.
The resulting website www.altarsofscience.com is clearly in play and shows the missing canister of antimatter that the Illuminati stole in the book/movie. In the book/movie, a live camera shows a countdown to the explosion of said canister and disastrous results. On the site, a countdown clock is naturally counting down to May 15, 2009, the release date of Angels & Demons.
If this is any early indication of the viral marketing campaign for the movie, it looks like Angels & Demons will easily surpass its predecessor.
