Saw the book, read the movie. Or was it the other way around?

Rating: 7/10 (4 June 2006)

See... that's the problem with reading a book which gets you so hooked you go to bed at 3:30AM only because you HAVE to be at work full throttle at 7am... you read it, you see it in your head, the movie becomes uninteresting because it left our parts you liked in the book.
I have to give Akiva Goldsman (screenplay) some credit... the concept of overlapping images to refer to situations on the book was nice, and some of those even looked like the one I saw in my head as I was reading the book, so, yea... it was nice to see that I was not far off Dan Brown's objective of being as explicit as possible for the reader to be able to look through Langdon's-Teabing's-Neveu's eyes, but it provided no new entertainment.
My wife whom had not read the book thought that the movie made her think, but that Hank's performance was the seen-before type, not mediocre, but certainly not innovative. I was expecting to see a more suave Langdon, as Brown portrays a highly-sought out bachelor.
Spoiler (?) Sir Ian McKellen's performance as expected, yet Goldsman's version of Teabing was not as fun-to-meet as Brown's, leaving McKellen not much to work with.
Howard's work was great, -big "Directed by Ron Howard" fan here, but the book has been read by SO many people that creativity for improvement allowed limited space for Howard's own version, as it is customary to be done by movie directors who like boos and 'translate' them into film. Why you ask? Because no matter how he came up with his own version, movie goers who read the book would have eaten him alive; what people wanted to do was see the book on the screen, and that pretty much leaves no room for a director's version of the story Spoilers: Although I did not like it, because of the way the movie was presented, there was basically no other ending BUT the one Howard went for, yet it was a little too pink. In all fairness, I do admit that the book's finale was a little too pretentious... you know, a French, white Beyoncé-type, gifted code breaker named Sophie Neveu offers Langdon a museum-less, church-less, tomb-less, art-less, relic-less week in Florence after learning that she is a Jesus-descendant... a little too the-good-guy-always-gets-the-girl, don't you think? If you have the $$$ for the movie ticket, you can probably afford the soft-cover version of the novel, so the choice is really yours.
Bottom line? Read the book instead, but if you are not going to read the book, watch the movie so you don't feel left out of the loop at lunch time chat.