That book keeps coming up in conversation a lot lately; I'm really going to have to read it.
I loved The Da Vinci Code when I read it. It's entertaining and I love all the topics it deals with and cross-references. It's fast-paced and easy to read and has a great story and characters. But it's still pretty light reading. I wouldn't go so far as to call it "fluff," but it's success is doubtlessly not based on any sort of literary merit. It's appeal lies elsewhere.
The film is terrible, a collasal disappointment. The book was virtually written to be made into a film, and Ron Howard succeeded in capturing absolutely none of it's rhythm or spirit. While Dan Brown may have certainly used simple character "types" as a device to tell his story, Howard whittled them down to no more than cardboard charicatures with no pulse and nothing to make them relatable or likeable. He recast Fache and Sauniere as something positively ugly, fully distorting their roles in the story, and Tom Hanks gives one of the worst, most drab and hackneyed performances of his career. Paul Bettany was pretty good, and Ian McKellan and Audrey Tatou did the best they could with their feeble roles. The speech at the end about faith had no point, and the dialogue that was added for the film was insipid. Some of the plot points were concolidated well, like there being only one cryptex instead of two, and the escape from the Louvre with the keys falling out from being the Madonna of the Rocks, but what didn't make sense at all was to briefly bring up the Hieros Gamos ritual, but change the entire reason for the fight between Sophie and Sauniere. Howard should have either had the courage to tell that part of the story and back it up with fair representation, or leave it out entirely. To show it in passing in such a way with no explanation of it's relevance - paired with the ridiculous incident of Sauneire screaming at the child - paints him as a monster, and then where is the audience to find their compasion for him after his murder, and for Sophie in her grief? And what was the point of making him NOT her grandfather? Stupid. Brown's Sauniere was a tender and loveable mastermind; Howard's, a confused and confusing corpse.
My biggest problem with the movie, though, is that it seems the main point Howard was trying to get across (if any at all other than Controversy!! Ticket Sales!!) was that Jesus was just a man and he and Mary Magdalen married had children - a point he then practically betrays by trying to pacify anyone in the audience who might be offended with his vulgar, childish, and two-faced tiatribes on faith. In Dan Brown's novel, however, the fact (or rather, proposition) of Jesus and Magdalen's union is not the whole point itself, but rather evidence of the book's greater purpose: that the sacred feminine has been devalued and villified in the last [however long, maybe two thousand years] of our human history, particularly in the West through patriachal religions, namely Christianity. It is my supposition, and probably other's, as well, that Brown does this not for the sake of controversy, but to show that if the very foundation of this patriachal vision is based on a misunderstanding, possibly even one that may have been intentionally perpetrated throughout generations, then maybe we need to seriously revist these values as an entire culture, both the pious and the pagan, in favor of not mere feminism or equal rights, but a truly sacred and pervasive union. Derivative or otherwise, naive or practicable, that to me is a beautiful notion, and none of it comes across in the film.
My first instinct when I heard Ron Howard was directing this was that he was totally the wrong person for the job. I should have trusted that impulse and stayed very far away from this disaster of an adaptation.