Review: Da Vince Code
May. 21st, 2006 02:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackI thought it worked quite well as a film. Much about the book could have been designed for it.
One of the things that aggravated me about the book was stupidity, and while there were still a few moments where I cringed[1], what was annoying as a book was normal for a film. And some of the things that griped me the most were gone, like the importance of Girl seeing her grandfather having sex, or the laboriousness on some of the puzzles.
I thought a lot of the visuals were good. Most of the charcters seemed -- contrary to my expectations -- well cast and enjoyable. The bad guys were vivid, and at least once we really nearly jumped.
The use of visual effects for flashbacks and puzzle solving were effective. The plot has many explanations of things that happened in the past, both in history, as children, and 2 minutes ago, and showing a misty edged brief clip of it well shows what happened whilst not breaking the clow of current events. Many of the puzzles showed LangdonVision, lighting up parts of the image or sliding them around, and none were wonderful, but making watching solving cryptograms/paintings exciting is hard, and it's a pretty damn good technique for it.
The history was AFAIK unconvincing, but fun if you don't take it at all seriously. I won't belabour all the things, but put in another word for the annoyance of comparing this to Foucault's Pendulum. If Umberto Eco had a point it's that (a) every nutcase under the sun who comes up with a crackpot conspiracy theory says the templars did it and (b) getting overobsessed with conspiracy theories is unhealthy. Da Vince Code seems mainly to represent a nutty conspiracy theory about the templars, not even made up by sympathetic characters (afaik) which isn't like FP, it's what FP was mocking :)
The theme of Da Vince Code, afaict, is not to trust shadowy conspiracies within the catholic church, but to trust shodowy other conspiracies instead. I have a certain symapthy for bewaring the church -- there certainly have been many bad things done over the years -- but I think most of the time a tight conspiracy is a simplistic version of what you're scared of; what's scary to me is that well meaning people in large groups in any organisation can come together to do horrendous things, and THAT, whatever the organisation, is what we should avoid.
And so someone is the descendant of Jesus. So what? Is whatever they're saying he was inherited? Are you going to issue a press release "I am son of son of god"? If you can do anything shouldn't you preach what's right -- like him? And be believed on you merits as well as your pedegree, like him? Is it really plausible that after 2000 years there's exactly one descendant? No-one had illegitamate or untraced children? Everyone had almost exactly one child, and all the others were killed off?
[1] "I'm from the mumble, the french equivalent of the fbi." -- OK, it does make sense he would have to explain that to an american; and it does make sense to tip off the audience to what's going on; but come on, he flashes a badge and starts talking about a murder? It's pretty obvious.
If you twice see someone show a symbol on a screen and ask what it is, and tell you it's actually something different, why do you guess equally confidently the third time?
I don't think "Pagan" was a specific religion better than christianity, isn't it a catchall term for various polytheistic religions? Can't you be more specific about who worshipped these sacred feminines we're apparently supposed to laud?
One of the things that aggravated me about the book was stupidity, and while there were still a few moments where I cringed[1], what was annoying as a book was normal for a film. And some of the things that griped me the most were gone, like the importance of Girl seeing her grandfather having sex, or the laboriousness on some of the puzzles.
I thought a lot of the visuals were good. Most of the charcters seemed -- contrary to my expectations -- well cast and enjoyable. The bad guys were vivid, and at least once we really nearly jumped.
The use of visual effects for flashbacks and puzzle solving were effective. The plot has many explanations of things that happened in the past, both in history, as children, and 2 minutes ago, and showing a misty edged brief clip of it well shows what happened whilst not breaking the clow of current events. Many of the puzzles showed LangdonVision, lighting up parts of the image or sliding them around, and none were wonderful, but making watching solving cryptograms/paintings exciting is hard, and it's a pretty damn good technique for it.
The history was AFAIK unconvincing, but fun if you don't take it at all seriously. I won't belabour all the things, but put in another word for the annoyance of comparing this to Foucault's Pendulum. If Umberto Eco had a point it's that (a) every nutcase under the sun who comes up with a crackpot conspiracy theory says the templars did it and (b) getting overobsessed with conspiracy theories is unhealthy. Da Vince Code seems mainly to represent a nutty conspiracy theory about the templars, not even made up by sympathetic characters (afaik) which isn't like FP, it's what FP was mocking :)
The theme of Da Vince Code, afaict, is not to trust shadowy conspiracies within the catholic church, but to trust shodowy other conspiracies instead. I have a certain symapthy for bewaring the church -- there certainly have been many bad things done over the years -- but I think most of the time a tight conspiracy is a simplistic version of what you're scared of; what's scary to me is that well meaning people in large groups in any organisation can come together to do horrendous things, and THAT, whatever the organisation, is what we should avoid.
And so someone is the descendant of Jesus. So what? Is whatever they're saying he was inherited? Are you going to issue a press release "I am son of son of god"? If you can do anything shouldn't you preach what's right -- like him? And be believed on you merits as well as your pedegree, like him? Is it really plausible that after 2000 years there's exactly one descendant? No-one had illegitamate or untraced children? Everyone had almost exactly one child, and all the others were killed off?
[1] "I'm from the mumble, the french equivalent of the fbi." -- OK, it does make sense he would have to explain that to an american; and it does make sense to tip off the audience to what's going on; but come on, he flashes a badge and starts talking about a murder? It's pretty obvious.
If you twice see someone show a symbol on a screen and ask what it is, and tell you it's actually something different, why do you guess equally confidently the third time?
I don't think "Pagan" was a specific religion better than christianity, isn't it a catchall term for various polytheistic religions? Can't you be more specific about who worshipped these sacred feminines we're apparently supposed to laud?
no subject
Date: 2006-05-21 01:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-21 02:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-22 05:37 am (UTC)Glad to see that the film looks good - it definitely read like it was intended to be filmed, and it's nice to know they've done a good job.