Given that the book and film adaptation of this Dan Brown potboiler are rather well known I�m going to skip mentioning the plot and head straight into the review proper. This cuts down the size of the review somewhat, possibly from my four paragraph ideal, but what the heck eh? I�d only be boring people otherwise. Now I enjoyed the book, I don�t think it�ll be thought back on as one of the finest novels ever written but it was a fun page-turner and the plot was zippy and worldly enough to keep me going for a good few days. By the end I felt satisfied that I had gotten my monies worth, and you really can�t ask for much more than that from modern literature.
The film on the other hand was rather disappointing. While it followed the plot in the book relatively well and all the major characters were present and correct, it was surprisingly dull and even had me pausing half-way through to tidy up the house a little bit. That should never happen. I�m not as scathing of book-to-film transitions as some of the purists among us but to me Ron Howard�s adaptation didn�t have any of the excitement, and only a bit of the millennia-old mystery, that Brown�s original did. Instead it seemed a rather by-the-numbers affair that treated some of the books most exciting scenes as mere window dressing.
One of the most disappointing things I noticed though was Hans Zimmer�s soundtrack, which barely followed the film at all. When we needed our heart to race, such as during Sophie Neveu�s mad-dash through the streets of Paris, I thought instead that we were watching a slow amble through a sun-drenched field. Where the plot called for tension we had light-heartedness, and so on. I�m a big fan of Zimmer but this felt like he was composing willy-nilly without the benefit of the finished film to work with. Though perhaps this was more to do with Ron Howard�s pedestrian direction, which barely attempted to engage the audience's emotion. Again, usually a big fan but this? I don't know, it all just seemed so� ordinary.
This is the fourth paragraph, phew, made it. |
