Minor spoilers. Skip this post if you don't want to know how the book/movie end.Well, I finished the book, and saw the movie on Friday. It was 2 1/2 hours long, but it was fast paced enough that it kept my interest and I didn't keep checking my watch. Of course, having snacks to munch on helped. When I saw The Aviator, it was 3 hours long and I had no snacks. I kept checking my watch wondering when it would be over. That was also just a plain bad movie, in my humble opinion. I have no idea why it was nominated for so many awards.
Anyway, the movie was okay, but (as usual) the book is better. The one thing good about the movie that was bad about the book was that at least the movie didn't have plot holes big enough to drive a Mac truck through. The book might be a page-turner and make you want to know what plot twist will occur next, but the glaring plot holes made it harder to enjoy.
Dan Brown's warped ideas about history - including well-known facts about Constantine that he ignored - makes it hard for anyone who knows anything about church history to take anything else seriously. Of course, he's banking on the fact that most Americans are illiterate in anything having to do with history. I took two semesters of church history in college, which is two semesters more than most people. It would be funny if some people didn't take his fiction to be fact. Even the preface page that starts off with "FACT" in big letters and then lists a series of supposed facts, is wrong. And yet people take that page seriously and think the novel is based in some kind of reality.
Back to the movie - good cinamatography, and you have to love Tom Hanks. Ian McKellen - Gandalf! - plays Leigh Teabing. It's funny. In real life he's a knight, and in this movie he plays someone who's a knight. :)
They have to shorten the movie a bit. In the book there are two cryptexes; it the movie there is only one. In the book, Sophie has a long lost brother; in the movie she has only a grandmother who is still alive. In the book, Sophie is related to Jacques Saunière; in the movie we find near the end that she's not related. At the very end of the book Robert Langdon (the main character) is back at the Louvre and runs downstairs to look at the inverted pyramid with the smaller pyramid poking up from the floor; at the end of the movie he walks on the sheer glass of the top of the inverted pyramid and then the camera pans down through the glass. Very cool.
In short, the movie is a good way to kill a couple and a half hours, but not something to be taken as having any truth to it. Also, the book is better, and would be the better bet if you have the time.
Technorati tagged: Bible, Bible study, God, Jesus, Christ, Christian, Christianity, Dan Brown, religion, faith, DaVinci Code, DaVinci, movie, movies
Photo courtesy IMDb.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment