GodSpy.com's John Murphy (who also lives here in Oregon) did not read TDVC, but saw the movie. He was less than impressed:
It’s not that the movie is bad. It might have been more entertaining if it was. Instead, DVC has that depressing kind of competency which signals lack of conviction married to bald-faced greed. The sets are big and expensive, but nothing interesting happens in them. The actors are top-notch, but the script doesn’t supply them with human beings to play.
Yes, indeed. Say what you will about Ron Howard, he was honest when he said he would be true to the novel. And so he was, making a movie that is tedious, pretentious, bloated, annoying, and just as arrogant and filled with error as Dan Brown's book.
DVC is more than anti-Catholic, though. Any movie with a plot that hinges on Christ having married Mary Magdalene and spawned a line of dissolute French monarchs (oh, and was also definitely not God) safely falls within the parameters of a more general kind of anti-Christianity. However, DVC is also anti-plausibility, anti-character development, anti-subtlety, and anti-fun. So I’m all for anything this movie is against. Frankly, I’m more offended by the ways in which the film insults my intelligence than I am by the ways in which it insults my faith. ...
If the movie is anything like the book (and I’ve heard it’s a faithful adaptation), then I am truly worried about the state of literacy in the world. What happened to the days when Dickens was hugely popular? Or Shakespeare could pack’em in at the Globe? I enjoy a good beach read, like anybody. But there is suspend-your-disbelief fun and then there is brain-frying stupidity. There are moments in this movie that border on self-parody.
I think it's safe to say that Shakespeare and Dickens aren't part of the vocabulary of most fourteen to twenty-two-year-old kids these days. I hardly had a top-notch public education, but in my senior English class I had to read Macbeth, Ivanhoe, My Name Is Asher Lev, Brave New World, and excerpts from Hemingway, Ambrose Pierce, and a few others. My English teacher retired soon thereafter and eight years later my sister was taught English literature by a young teacher obsessed with Bram Stoker's Dracula — to the degree his class spent an entire semester on that single book. Anyhow, I am inclined to think that the "brain-frying stupidity" of TDVC novel/movie are so successful because such stupidity has become the genius of our time. And heaven help anyone who announces that the emperor is both naked and stupid. As Chesterton wrote in one of his bazillion columns: "These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own." Even when those creeds involve little more than mocking the Creed...
... in decent screenwriting and filmmaking. One word: pathetic. If I were Dan Brown I would sue Sony and Ron Howard for doing what I thought was impossible: making a movie that was worse than the novel, which is like Isaiah Thomas taking over the Knicks and making that team even worse. Hey, it can be done, but it takes a special sort of, um, genius to do so.
Anyhow, sports comparisons aside, Steve Greydanus's review of The Da Vinci Code is excellent and right on the money. The changes made to the movie do not, as he rightly points out, "soften" the anti-Catholicism, but merely make it that much more insidious. I nearly laughed aloud a couple of times when Langdon and Teabing disagreed about this or that historical point -- and both were wildly wrong. The not-so-funny aspect of such exchanges is that some viewers will see this is as an example of serious debate between two scholars, but will never bother to see if the "competing" perspectives offered have any basis in real scholarship.
The movie is painfully long and dreadfully self-important. It is, in fact, very much like the novel, which is a poorly written, overwrought, pseudo-intellectual piece of anti-Catholic rot. In The Da Vinci Hoax, Sandra Miesel and I offered a description of the novel that fits the movie just as well: "The Da Vinci Code is custom-made fiction for our time: pretentious, posturing, self-serving, arrogant, self-congratulatory, condescending, glib, illogical, superficial, and deviant." Thus, it's irritating to read so many reviews (not Steve's, of course) insisting that the movie lacks the magic, charm, wit, excitement, intensity, blah, blah, blah of the novel. Poppycock. The movie simply reveals many of the serious artistic flaws of the novel; it hardly could avoid doing so, unless the screenplay had completely departed from the novel. It seems to me that most people today make more demands of what they see in a theater than they make of what they read on the page. Part of that, I'm sure, is because many fans of TDVC don't read many books, or, to be more precise, many good books.
The movie, like the novel, takes its message very, very seriously. This is blatantly obvious in the final 15 minutes, when Langdon (Tom Hanks) yammers endlessly about how the most important thing is what you believe -- not whether or not it is true, good, or right. While deviating in exact language from the novel, this is essentially Brown's message (as he as expressed in interviews): we must be able to create our own truth and not have truth shoved down our throats by nasty old men who are selling us the lie called Christianity. This is a misleading and false choice, of course, but one that plays very well in today's culture.
Finally, I figured (as did nearly everyone else) that the opening weekend would be huge for this movie. And it was. But I also thought that its numbers would substantially decrease after the first weekend. However, I wonder now if I was wrong in thinking so. Like the novel, the movie will continue to attract attention. The only advantage held by the novel, so to speak, was that it came out of the blue; the movie has been met with a flood of criticism and response, which has, to some extent, changed perceptions of the movie, if only to cause nearly every review on the planet to condescendingly point out that it's "just a movie" and "just entertainment." And why is it so entertaining to millions of people? Well, it's not because of the writing, the characters, or the plot. In large part it's because many people want to be told that it's alright to reject and bash Catholicism, and feel as though they are smart and sophisticated in doing so. However, if, as I think is the case, people do take their movies more seriously then their reading material, perhaps the movie will end up sinking quickly.
I plan to post a few more thoughts about the movie and reaction to it in the next couple of days. Again, Steve's review is an excellent and accurate assessment of the movie.