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Instead of the novel’s devout-but-naive ascetic-who ends up donating millions of dollars to the victims of his scheme-we are given a rotund conniving villain. His "world of the soul, not of the flesh" has been swapped for the abundantly fleshy world of Alfred Molina, the actor who plays the role.
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In the movie, we have a separate secret society, which includes Aringarosa, within the Church, whose entire purpose is to destroy the Priory of Sion’s big secret: Mary Magdalene’s tomb and the genealogical documents related to Jesus’ supposed descendents.Īs a consequence, the character of Aringarosa has been utterly transformed. The book focuses on a Vatican plan to “disassociate” Opus Dei from the Roman Catholic Church, driving Bishop Aringarosa-the head of Opus Dei-to trust the novel’s villain.
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Above all, the central crisis that triggers the novel’s action has been changed completely. Some seem to be concessions to the book’s critics others seem to be provocations. In the long run, this kind of feeble, fictional “attack” will probably end up doing far more good than harm to Christianity, Catholicism, and Opus Dei.ĭespite his literal-minded effort to “film the book,” Howard wasn’t afraid to make some significant changes. "The Da Vinci Code" is so cluttered with historical, symbological, and theological pseudo-facts that it seems hard to imagine any viewer, even one who manages not to doze off, walking out of the theater with a coherent recollection of what exactly has been said-which is probably a blessing. It’s all there: Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the Gnostic “gospels,” Constantine and the Council of Nicea, medieval witches, the Templars, the Priory of Sion, Clement V, the Crusades, Opus Dei, etc. Of course, it would have been impossible to cram all the mistakes and absurdities of the novel into even a five-hour film, but in the mere two-and-a-half hours at his disposal, Howard does his solemn best. Earnest fidelity seems to have been Howard’s goal. There isn’t a single laugh or thrill in the whole film.
#Opus da vinci code movie#
Ultimately, it looks as though director Ron Howard erred in trying to make a serious movie out of a fundamentally unserious book.
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It is this cultural cocktail-not the thrills, not the supposed “blasphemy”-that is the source of the novel’s allure and runaway sales. That is why the greatest measurable impact of "The Da Vinci Code" has been not on religious practice (more or less unchanged), but rather on tourism (record numbers at sites in Paris, London, and Rome). As a loopy cocktail of pseudo-culture, however, it was a tour-de-force. Perhaps it was a mistake to treat the novel as a thriller. So I’ll move on to the more interesting question: What exactly went wrong? After all, the book, for all its faults, managed to be fun in a stupid comic-book way. Unfortunately, the "Da Vinci Code’s" silliness is not nearly as light and entertaining as James Bond’s, but now that the critics seem to have exhausted all the different ways of saying the film is lousy, it’s probably useless to point out its flaws yet again (stale, humorless, boring, long, unimaginative, over-stuffed… it’s all that and more). The caricature presented is so unrecognizable, so far off the mark, that you can’t really feel outrage, because you don’t even feel like a target. By way of example, try to imagine a British intelligence officer watching a James Bond movie: yes, England exists, and, yes, spies exist, but apart from that, it’s all pretty much hooey. What’s it like for someone who’s been a member of Opus Dei for more than 20 years to watch "The Da Vinci Code"? It turns out to be a fairly amusing experience.