The Da Vinci Code is entertaining despite all the negative reviews
Yes the pace is a bit slow at the beginning, yes Audrey Tautou and Tom Hanks are terribly miscast (I would much have preferred Clive Owen, Matthew Fox – the Lost lead, a younger Harrison Ford or Pierce Brosman or an older Christian Bale), but ultimately the experience is satisfying. Ian McKellen is brilliant. The dialogues are good and the movie is faithful to the book. I can’t wait to see the movie adaptation of Angels & Demons!
I am to disagree with you for once, saw both X-Men and the Da Vinci Code this weekend.
X-Men was surprisingly good, although a bit on the short side, which left a lot of the characters undeveloped.
The Da Vinci Code however was a total waste of my time: It is a faithful adaptation of the book, and really shows how silly the book is (although definitely a page-turner). Tom Hanks makes his worst Ben Affleck impression, and Audrey Tatou is at best pretty. Their chemistry is absolutely non-existent.
As for the plot? Well, they might as well have made a movie about “Sudoku”, it’s about as exciting..
The major mistake with these kinds of books is that a single movie in not sufficient to deal with all the details of the book.
They did it before with Umberto Eco’s best seller “The name of Rose”, which was a good movie, but it didn’t follow the details of the book to appreciate the different religious movements, heretic sects and cover ups in one of the most controversial but also exciting period in the history of the humanity: the middle age. Eco wrote another fantastic book “The Pendulum of Faucoult”,related to the Templar Knights and the Satanic sects in Torino (the city of the Devil), but nobody tried to convert it into a movie this time. Too many historical details.
NOTE: Umberto Eco work is syndicated by the New York Times
Back to the “Da Vinci Code”, I liked the movie a lot with maybe some changes in the acting, but it’s not possible to tell all the important details and discovers in just a couple of hours. This should be a mini-serie in which the audience should have the time to digest all the details and it should be forbidden to tell anything before the movie’s out otherwise you really loose the suspense (there are still millions of people who didn’t read the book). The week before the movie was out in the theatres, the Discovery Channel, The History Channel and the National Geographic Channel were doing what the movie should have done … a mini-serie on the Da Vinci code. It made sense if all these programs came out after the movie.
Anyway, the movie is a huge success up to now. $150M in the US and $320 worldwide breaking any record in Italy, Spain and South America (the catholic fortresses).
The movie came out in a moment in which people are asking the religions to be consistent with faith and history.
The only reason why the Da Vinci code generated such a anger and disappointment in the Christian communities is because it came immediately after the presentation of the “Gospel of Judas” in a period in which on one side the Church tries to close the doors to the the new reformation of the church based on the real life events, and also in a period in which the concept of family in the last 30 years changed more quickly than in the previous 300 years. It’s history the fact that there are still 30 gnostic gospels around (Mary, Philip, etc.)saying fascinating stories around the character of Jesus and that most of the gnostic gospels written had been destroyed by the Emperor Constantin when he embraced the Cristian religion just before dying. We missed a lot of interesting interpretations.
The BBC is filming a revolutionary documentary in 4 parts regarding the reform of the church that will certainly generate more fire in the discussion than the “Da Vici Code” and the “Gospel of Judas” together.
The last news is that an Atheist sued the Catholic Church regarding the proves of the existence of Jesus and the Europen Court legitimated his request of proves while the Italian justice was archiving the case. Not proves of faith of course that are not possible to be demonstrated in a court of law, but real concrete proves.
Welcome to the Da Vinci Code if this can wake up our sense of humanity, faith and our need to think with our brains.
Actually, Audrey Tautou fits the mental image that I had of Sophie while reading the book, but — except for the scene where she tears into Silas for killing her grandfather — she doesn’t give too much life to the film.
As for Tom Hanks, he is too good an actor to completely fail in the role of Langdon, but he doesn’t convey the sense of intellectuality that one would associate with a Harvard professor. Guy Pearce (from Memento and LA Confidential) would have been my choice for the role. A younger Peter Weller would have been an ideal choice, inasmuch as he is an actual professor of art history at (I believe) Syracuse University.