Saw the movie for the first time yesterday; read the book along with everybody else when it was the hot topic some time back. Both impressed me with how hard they were trying to impress me. At least Sherlock Holmes took a few minutes to figure out the more arcane and intricate puzzles; at least Doyle was aware that his readers required some “think time” to catch up with the action, even if that might mean setting the book down long enough to cogitate and ponder things. Sure, Doyle went out of his way to dazzle the reader with the depth of Holmes’s deductive and observational skills, but the main puzzle(s) of the story were presented in a way to tantalize the reader with enough clues to let the reader beat Sherlock to the punch.
Brown seems to want Langdon to be Sherlock on speed. Give him a complex code and he dashes off an answer, under pressure, in a matter of moments. Hanks appears at times to have difficulty get himself oriented to a room while simultaneaously dashing off the mental magic of deciphering some clue on the floor. A bit hard to take from a “worship the hero” point of view.
One good thing about the movie: Audrey Tautou is very easy to look at.
I wouldn’t advise reading the book at all. It’s one of the worst pieces of writing I have ever had the misfortune to see published. I genuinely thought it was satirising bad fiction when I first started to read it. I have avoided the film like the plague.
It’s become fashionable to trash the book – I’ll bet Dan Brown is crying all the way to the bank – but the wife and I both found it to be a fun read. The movie was okay to watch once. People take these things way too seriously.
Biblical knowledge or lack of it is quite irrelevent when you’re so bored by a film that you doze through most of it, wake up now and then and wonder why it’s not over yet.
I liked it. I am, however, notoriously easily entertained and pretty willing to accept the premise of a movie at face value (probably why I enjoy science fiction and fantasy movies so much) without questioning how “true” it is. I had issues with the book… mainly the writing style sucked and I thought that while some of the puzzles they figured out easily, I felt my intelligence was insulted when they struggled with puzzles that were bleedingly obvious to the reader. Most of my issues with the book were not present in the movie.
See, now you’ve made me wonder if I would like it. I love cheesy Sci-Fi. I’m not a big reading fan, so it’s more than likely I will never read the book. I suppose if I’m bored I don’t need to finish the movie and I’m at a real loss as to what to put on my Netflix q. I’ve rented some real bombs lately.
I’ve got about 250 movies and tV shows in my q. and of course that does not count all the ones I’ve watched previously; I could make some suggestions if there are certain things you are interested in.
I regretted it when I started reading it; I am not swayed by others’ opinions. My wife kept bugging me to read it so I did.
I guess the reason I finished it was that it was mildy entertaining to read the most ridiculous pieces of dialog out loud to her and then give my $0.02 about why I thought it was stupid.
Well, it’s not really like cheesy sci-fi - if it were in that style, I might have a better opinion of it; I like camp as much as the next guy I would characterize the style as pompous fiction; the author at all times wants you to know that he knows more than you do. Because his writing style is so terrible, he just comes off as pompous.
I also agree that many of the devices were painfully obvious (including the identity of the “villian”, which I knew as soon as the character was introduced).