Monday, April 21, 2008

The DaVinci Ehhhhh

Regular readers, if there are any, may remember my dabbling with the DaVinci Code a few years back. All four of you may also remember my obvious…contempt for the book.
Well…I got the movie. Not *bought* the movie, or *paid* for the movie. Withdrawn from the library is more like it.

I gave up on the book 28 chapters in, fed up with the farfetched writing and simply awful pretentiousness of the historical inaccuracies and the cavalier way they were thrown about. Insofar as the movie goes… let’s see…

It has a very big name cast. Tom Hanks, Jean Reno, Alfred Molina, and Sir Ian McKellan. It also looks very good. The cinematography is well done, with dramatic shading conveying the tension that a thriller should. The acting is pretty good across the board, not best actor/actress of course (props going to McKellan for making a so-so movie watchable, just like in X-3) but serviceable.
The story is…watered down from the tinfoil hat concepts of the book, but not too much, and as such, I still sit and ultimately can’t enjoy the movie.

It may sound arrogant, but a story so steeped in outright historical ignorance (and as last time, my major complaints about the garbage are historical and not theological-there are others more schooled in theology than I) is not at all enjoyable to a lover and reader of history. I could write at length about the confusion and conspiracies about the meteoric rise and fall of the Knights Templar, but there really isn’t any time/room for that right now. Suffice it to say the actual truth is much, much more intricate, tragic and dramatic than what has been laid forth by this story.

This story….sadly it is just silly garbage that isn’t worth my time, nor anyone else’s.