[REVIEW] The Da Vinci Code
I caught The Da Vinci Code tonight with an old friend from Queen's, and was surprised at how much I enjoyed the film. Tom Hanks was merely adequate, Audrey Tautou was good, Ian McKellan chewed up his scenes gloriously, and Ron Howard's filming was surprisingly pedestrian, but then, I went in expecting little enough as was. Possibly I should have spent my $11.95 more wisely, but the film was about as good as it could have been given the source material.
I still have to agree with the opinion expressed in The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction that The Da Vinci Code reads not as a novel but rather as a schematic for a computer game: The player identifies with the protagonist of Langdon, is plunged unexpectedly into a complex adventure, is sent to complete with his sidekick multiple levels (several in Paris, one in the French countryside, one on the plane, several in London, a final in Scotland), and ends up seeing, as reward for completing the game, the final secrets via a bonus computer animation. Though I'd not read the novel completely, mainly because I'd already read Holy Blood, Holy Grail and didn't see any reason to inflict Brown's prose upon myself, I was told by my companion that the film followed the novel fairly faithfully. I wonder, now, how closely the actual game follows Brown's schematic.
I still have to agree with the opinion expressed in The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction that The Da Vinci Code reads not as a novel but rather as a schematic for a computer game: The player identifies with the protagonist of Langdon, is plunged unexpectedly into a complex adventure, is sent to complete with his sidekick multiple levels (several in Paris, one in the French countryside, one on the plane, several in London, a final in Scotland), and ends up seeing, as reward for completing the game, the final secrets via a bonus computer animation. Though I'd not read the novel completely, mainly because I'd already read Holy Blood, Holy Grail and didn't see any reason to inflict Brown's prose upon myself, I was told by my companion that the film followed the novel fairly faithfully. I wonder, now, how closely the actual game follows Brown's schematic.