The da Vinci Code

Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 | Personal

A good while ago this ‘spectacular’ movie came out, based on Dan Brown‘s novel. When it came out, most critics pretty much eviscerated it for its poor quality. Last week I watched it on DVD, and I have to say… the critics were pretty lenient on it. While the novel wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of literary craftmanship, it was leagues better than the movie. Now, if we neatly sidestep the whole anti-Christian bias in the novel and movie, there are still a great number of unfortunate changes from the novel.

Enter Langdon, the middle-aged bachelor university professor in religious symbolism. Hanks conveys the image of Langdon rather poorly in my opinion, but I’m sure others will disagree.

In the novel, Langdon is disturbed at his hotel room after giving a guest lecture on his latest book. In the movie we see the police officer show up in the middle of Langdon signing books and showing him a picture of Saunière (the guy who died, in case anyone is wondering) in the middle of it all. To the astonished gasps of the attendees. We quickly change the scene to the Louvre where Langdon is to be questioned by the chief investigator, Fachè, as his primary suspect.

In the middle of the investigation, the second main character shows up, the charming Sophie who is a member of the cryptography unit of the Paris police. She arrives with a faux phone message for Langdon telling him that he is in danger and she starts a ploy to ‘free’ him from Fachè. So far so good.

Now, once freed, they start discussing the fibonacci sequence that Saunière has written on the floor and Langdon suddenly guesses that it’s a key to the rest of the message that it’s an anagram for something else. Langdon, a professor in symbolism, sees this, not the female cryptographer who has spent ages learning about substitution ciphers, Vignière ciphers, elliptic curve cryptography and the Gods knows what else. Audrey Tautou is reduced to nothing more than a beautiful side-kick without the brains to go with a degree in mathematics. Pitiful.

Jumping a bit ahead, in the end of the movie, suddenly everything is revealed from Langdon glancing at a few newspaper clips that Sophie is actually of the Saint-Claire family and she is the sangreal. Then the whole Priory of Sion shows up in the church where this revelation takes place, and a woman tells Sophie that she is her grandmother. Now contrast this with the entire premise of the book: only four members of the Priory of Sion knows of the Sangreal: the three sénéchaux and the grand master, now the entire Priory shows up and says ‘by the way, hi, we’re here to protect you’. And then we close up the movie with a bit of philosophical meandering on whether Sophie revealing herself to the world would constitute the final breakdown of the Catholic church and restore the true gospel of Christ, or something to that effect. Honestly!

There is a host of changes from the novel to the movie, hardly any for the better, most for the worse. Wikipedia has a long list of differences for those who are interested in the finer details. I had low expectations for this movie, and even they were let down. The only relatively positive side to the movie was Sir Ian McKellen, as he successfully portrayed Sir Leigh Teabing to perfection.

Just pitiful.

Edit: Just to clarify then I am not regarding the book or movie as fact. I am also not demeaning the book. I am, however, saying that given whatever qualities the book may or may not have had, the movie loses any and all of them.

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