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.
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.