I cracked the Code

Last night, we went to see The Da Vinci Code. It was pretty much exactly like the book. That would normally lead to the conclusion "if you liked the book, you'd like the movie." I'd say it probably is more accurate to say that "if you liked the book, you won't hate the movie." But the problem really is that the best bit about the book was the following tactic: towards the end of relatively short chapters, Professor Langdon would say something like "unless it really isn't a cup?" or "I've got it now." Then you could have to read on to find out what he meant. This you would do about 1000 times until you were at the end of the book. Then you would remark: "boy, that was a real page turner!" It was as hard to leave a half read book of this kind as it would be to leave a half eaten box of Krispy Kreame donuts.

The problem is that if you have read the book, this experience of continual revelation isn't there. The best that you can hope for is that you forgot what clues were revealed and you are surprised again. For me at least that didn't happen often. I wonder what the movie experience would be like if you hadn't ready the book? We will have to force those 3 people to go so we can find out.

What you do get in the movie (and it is not really worth the ticket price for just that) is better graphics. Now I don't mean this in terms of CGI but instead in lecture presentations. Robert Langdon presents a book tour lecture with some superb use of what might have been PowerPoint but seemed to good so you can't know. Then the evil history buff uses some other lecture presentation material to move around people in the Last Supper and show us other things. Now you just don't get that in the book. But the real mystery to me was "how did they do that?" Where can I get my hands on that presentation software? It may really beef up my lectures.

As I watched the movie the clues were revealed. But I'll tell you about that in my next post (don't read it if you don't want the mystery revealed).