RateItAll: The Opinion Network

Way bellow the tense and fast pacing of the book, it's a waste of time.

She made me watch it. The days of people handing blank checks to Tom Hanks should be over.

Competently made, but tiresome.

Prettily filmed, but vapid.

Not particularly well written or acted, and like a lot of Howard movies, kind of empty and without any sense of heart.

UPDATE: I knocked this flick down a star when I watched it on cable. The small screen really demonstrates how goofy, in fact imbecilic, was this offering.

ORIGINAL COMMENT: You know, this has been the biggest buildup of any book-film combo since Jonathon Livingston Seagull around 1970. Remember that dud? Well you really can't do much with an existential seagull.

The hype around DVC has been enormous. This is supposed to be a cultural changing event, a blow to organized religion, etc.

Martha and I went to the flick on its release. I was pleasantly surprised to see a more up-scale crew of watchers in lieu of the usual slack-jawed gaggle of mouth-breathers who interrupted their wacking off or maybe video games to come see the latest block-buster.

First of all, it was loooong, according to my watch over 2 1/2 hours. I can't sit that long and had to make a couple of bathroom breaks.

I hardly recognized Tom Hanks at first, but he did alright and the other cast members were o.k. also.

If you are a Christian and particularly a member of the Catholic Church, relax. This flick is going to do absolutely nothing. It is a glorified Mission Impossible.

It starts off with a bang with the murder in the Louvre, but then every fifteen minutes or so it stops to update you on what is happening. If you haven't read the book, you are gonna be lost. It reminds me of the "Dune" movie about 20 years ago.

Basically here we are supposed to have the greatest secret in human history, but then Leonardo gets it in his noggin to stick some clues out there so some 21st Century mopes can figure it all out. Yeah, sure.

The book was fine as fiction but laughable as fact. I am a historian and religion is one of my history beats. Brown cribbed a bunch of materials from various spurious Gnostic Gospels that were rejected 1800 years ago and sells it as fact. A total joke, but the ignoramus weak-minded will probably lap it up and have done so.

Of course a lot of anti-Christians and anti-Catholics out there provide a ready market.

The movie is worth seeing but is maybe a 3 1/2 knocked down to three for the disappointment with pouring 250 million dollars down this rat hole.

The critics here and abroad have been yucking it up and savaging this flick and I can see why!

I don't think this is the greatest movie ever or anything, but it wasn't bad either. I watched this movie when I was flying to Denver from Orlando, and it kept me entertained. I do think Tom Hanks is an excellent actor, and I believe the movie would have been alot worse if he wasn't in it...his acting saved the movie from being a bomb I believe...

Finally got to see it on Hotel Selectavision (under slightly moldy releases category). I read the book. I really liked the book. But even while reading the book, I just didn't see this story making the transition to the silver screen. How can you take long streams of dialogue to explain the multitude of hypthoses bandied about in the book and hold the attention of the average short-attention spanned American. Dan Bown's "Angels and Demons" has better potential of being a hit movie because it is non-stop action. As for DaVinci, the movie had more dead spots than the parquet floor of the old Boston Garden (We'll miss you Red!!!). I dozed off a couple of times. I wasn't too impressed with Tom Hanks portraying Langdon. It's just not his type of role. The character playing Sophie was no great shakes either. And Paul Bettany is so unmenacing in physical presence, he was simply miscast as Silas. The old queer, Sir Ian McKellan, was great as usual. I gave it a middle-of-the-road review because it did explain some things that were a bit too cryptic from just reading the text in the book. I know certain religious groups were offended by the movie. But I don't think they have too much to worry about. It's not like I'm hearing about some new cult forming that prays to Mary Magdalene on Thursdays.

Fiction, a story, bla, bla, bla... What bothers me about this movie and the book is that you take something that is important to people such as their faith and you blaspeme it. Yes, I've said it's fiction and that's all it is, but it is not like Moby Dick the Whale, because people believe in Jesus and those truths about him. So why do some Christians get upset over this? Well, consider this, if someone wrote a story about your family member that was untrue but said; "hey it's just fiction!" How would you feel? Mad? Hurt? Maybe you wouldn't, but I probably would...

While this was enjoyable to watch, no movie is worth this much hype, on either end. It's just ridiculous how much time it got on the Today Show in the previous months, and the "debate" over it is, well, full-out retarded.

Let's start by checking out something at dictionary.com:

fiction (fkshn) n.:
3. a. A literary work whose content is produced by the imagination and is not necessarily based on fact.
3. B. The category of literature comprising works of this kind, including novels and short stories.

It's a story. Stop taking it so seriously. And this is for everyone ranging from those who are boycotting this movie because it's "offensive" to their faith (and, yet, somehow Indiana Jones can disintegrate a couple of Nazis with the Ark of the Covenant and that's perfectly cool) to those who will, inevitably, make pilgrimages and start praying at the Louvre like a gaggle of morons.

Now that I got that out of my system, let's ignore the concept's critics and fans and discuss the actual movie itself. I haven't read the book yet, so I don't know (nor care) how similar/dissimilar it may be, so I'll skip that part.

SYNOPSIS: Robert Langdon is a Professor of Religious Symbolism at Harvard. After the bizarre death of the curator of the Louvre, Langdon becomes under suspicion as the murderer. With the help of Sophie, the curator's granddaughter (and the deciphering of some ridiculously outlandish puzzles), they uncover a massive conspiracy regarding the Christian faith as the world knows it.
PROS: Fast-paced, and generally entertaining. The up-close and intimate visits to such famous locations as the Louvre and the tomb of Sir Issac Newton was nice.
CONS: I'm not sure if I liked the character development of Sophie. First, she's an exceptionally smart woman who can take care of herself, then she kind of devolves into being somewhat helpless and weak. I suppose a night like that could crack a person like that, but there was little in the way of a transition. The story tries a little too hard to be "smart", and it shows.
OVERALL: Just have fun watching it. It's entertaining enough, but don't expect it to be the Holy Grail of movies, either.

If you take one thing to the theater with you, I advise it to be a grain of salt.

Director Ron Howard seems to have feared making clear any controversial statement in the book; the villains of every possible persuasion turn out to be either irrational zealots of whatever persuasion or merely misguided souls. There is no rationale or explanation to what brought about the conspiracy at this particular moment that did not take place years earlier. The movie blames any and all posible contemporary organizations. Ironically, best rendered are the all too brief flashbacks that accompany the unnecessary didactic attempt to 'enlighten' the audience.

There are better things to do than trying to make sense of so much protracted historical exposition - most of which is already in the public domain - and unresolved issues.

Audiences that a few years ago looked favorably upon 'Titanic' would deserve and expect something much more challenging. The dialogue is unremarkable by any standards; the foreboding music is unmerited and the acting, by all concerned, is no better than what you find in the standard action programmer.

Basically, we're expected to suspend disbelief largely because Forrest Gump is involved in the 'mystery.' Case in point: early on, a man in the Louvre Museum at night suffers a fatal shot to the stomach; bleeding to death, he has the presence of mind to rise, stumble about as he makes up complex and time-consuming anagrams and cryptograms regarding an earthshaking conspiracy, which he scribbles along different places in the museum, to be desciphered soon afterwards by an eminent expert of his acquaintance whom the police should summon immediately afterwards. Never mind that everyone, including the expert, is unaware of the existence of the cryptic messages, invisible as they are to the naked eye because, you see, they were written with some writing apparatus that, presumably, the dying man happens to carry with him. Of course, a conveniently placed lighting instrument will materialize, to make the messages visible.

We are told that victim and scientist were in the past at odds regarding religious matters. So Novelist Dan Brown would be put to task explaining why the investigator should be expected to take sides with the dead man's concerns. Of course, explanations regarding motivation (scientific curiosity? Or the grief of the dead man's granddaughter, perhaps) are assumed but not forthcoming.

The dialogue on paper is unpersuasive on screen, even coming from Ian McKellen, purpotedly Dan Brown's mouthpiece.

It matters little who is on whose side and how much of the blame of the bloody mayhem, historical or otherwise, can be assigned. In the end, it the conspirators in the movie might have better not brought in Robert Langdon into the whole affair to begin with - considering what the alternative entailed.