I'm still trying to get over the irony that an organisation which wants us to believe in someone who can:

1. Rise from the dead
2. Walk on water
3, Feed 5,000 people on a handful of loaves and fishes
4. Turn water into wine

Is telling us to ignore the ideas that:

1. Two people could have sexual intercourse
2. Big organisations can tell fibs

As too far-fetched and dangerously fantastic propaganda which is affecting susceptible masses.

But I'm cynical like that.

(Edited by Samanfur 23/05/2006 19:44)

I thought this was a fantastic film. I'm coming from the point of view of not having read the book, but I did think it was a damn good watch

Even though I know the whole story is fictional, it does raise some interesting questions and has seriously got me thinking!

Go see it

P.S. I worked it out quickly

Found it a bit slow in parts and found Hanks miscast for the role. They should have done the better one of Browns Langdon books Angels and Demons, makes me wonder if they will do that one as a sequel now as opposed to prequel.

If ever a novel demanded to become a film, it's The Da Vinci Code. It's not a book at all. Lacking any ambiguity of prose and removing the job of visual imagination entirely from the reader with its exhaustive descriptions, it's a clinically-obese screenplay. But it's also a nightmare proposition for any director. Extracting a lean plot from Dan Brown's jumble of codes, anagrams and fantasy-history was always going to be a challenge.

It's to screenwriter Akiva Goldsman and director Ron Howard's credit that they almost pull it off.

Doing the job an editor should have done long ago, they ruthlessly prune the book down to its essentials. The opening in the Louvre's Grande Galerie does in 10 minutes what Brown stretched over 200 interminable pages. The film doesn't look back, giving the plot the time it needs and no more. It's the movie's greatest strength and weakness. The Da Vinci Code finally has pace, but even the cardboard characters need more exposition than the seizure-inducing flashbacks give them. I doubt anyone who didn't read the book would have a clue who Silas was.

But that's the point: the film assumes you have. Then again, gambling the box office on that isn't what you'd call an outside bet.

It's almost worth struggling through all 500-odd pages to get the most out the film. It could have been a hack-job, but talented Apollo 13 camera-jockey Ron Howard uses every trick he knows to replace reams of prose with swift visual-exposition. The ghostly flashbacks were particularly inventive, and he never fails to use the film's checklist of architectural icons to their fullest. Akiva Goldsman keeps the book's one decent joke and makes another funny, but otherwise rewords Brown's dialogue left right and centre. He also pops in several inventive additions, cleverly working Langdon's claustrophobia into the plot as something besides a cheap cliffhanger device.

Star Tom Hanks phones-in his performance, but to be fair Langdon barely credits a text-message. Audrey Tautou (she of Amélie fame) underplays Sophie Neveu to the point of invisibility, but again, that's no more than the character deserves. The meat of the dish was always going to be Terminator monk Silas and "British Royal Historian" Leigh Teabing, and both are delivered all guns blazing (sorry) by Paul Bettany and Ian McKellen. McKellen hams it up more than a pig in an abattoir and Bettany portrays the most believable self-mortifying albino ever committed to screen. And strips bollock-naked. Although he has promised that, if it's ever integral to a role, he might keep his clothes on one of these days.

The film only begins to come apart with the convoluted reveal of the Teacher's identity. His motives aren't adequately explained, and the book's Opus Dei red-herring is completely lost in the confusion. But everyone saw it coming 300 pages off, so who cares. Howard holds the final half-hour together by changing Brown's dismal ending as much as he dare, and even makes the twist-upon-a-twist tenable with some snappy cinematography and Hans Zimmer's bombastic score. Like the rest of the film it's as subtle as an iron bar to the skull, but it's atmospheric, to the point that you're well outside the theatre before you remember what a senseless silage-heap the conspiracy really is.

Realistically it's the best the movie could hope to achieve.



(Edited by Byron 03/06/2006 17:07)

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by JtB
Found it a bit slow in parts and found Hanks miscast for the role. They should have done the better one of Browns Langdon books Angels and Demons, makes me wonder if they will do that one as a sequel now as opposed to prequel.

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They completely ditched the Liberal Pope sub-plot behind Opus Dei's sudden Grail fixation (making Silas's appearance completely inexplicable, but hey, I'll forgive 'em that), so it's perfectly possible. I have heard from reliable sources that Angels and Demons is quite a bit better (and shorter!) than The Da Vinci Code, so might try and borrow it sometime. I don't think Mr Brown's going anywhere in a hurry. Well, nowhere that $20 million royalties wouldn't send you.

My basic summing up is, if you liked the book you'll probably like the film just for pure enjoyment factor. If you're a film snob, avoid it like the plague.

I thought the casting for Teabing was all wrong though, I imagined him to be chubby and friendlier and less creepy.

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by Miss Corrupt
My basic summing up is, if you liked the book you'll probably like the film just for pure enjoyment factor. If you're a film snob, avoid it like the plague.

I thought the casting for Teabing was all wrong though, I imagined him to be chubby and friendlier and less creepy.

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I'm a film snob, and I rather enjoyed it.

Teabing was indeed nothing like the book, but I've always thought adaptations deserve license as there's no point just copying the source. If McKellen works in the film, I say go with it.