Ron Howard proves his genius

Rating: 9/10 (29 May 2006)

Turning Dan Brown's lengthy and detailed novel into a movie that works was a hairy, hairy problem. (Brown himself said that his own screenplay would have worked out to a 20 hour film -- or longer!) Yet Ron Howard's take on the book is a tremendous success. The filming is marvelous. The story is well-told, and clear to follow. It's true to the source material, keeping in just enough of the background as needed to tell the story. The acting is fantastic. Most impressive, Howard avoids cardboard characters and treacly sentiment (like the requisite romance between Langdon and Sophie that was in the book), and avoids a total sell-out of the book in order to appease Bible-thumpers.
The major criticisms of this movie that I have seen are 1) It's not as good (or as detailed) as the book and 2) it's sacrilegious.
Neither of those I find really significant; in response to #1 I can't imagine a *better* screen version of the book than this.
And as for #2: oh well, that's the problem with free speech... people say things you don't agree with.
Rank-and-file Catholics like to believe that all the facts of Christianity were written down on a long sheet of paper by God himself, and that only someone inspired by Satan would question the foundations of Christianity. What Brown's book (and now movie) show is the FACT of just how much play there was in the development of the Catholic/Christian Mythos. The Catholic Church and Christian faith were the creation of MEN, who each believed that they were on the right track to God. Their arguments and disagreements went back to the very earliest days: Paul thought that the "Three Pillars" of the Jerusalem disciples -- Peter especially -- were bone-heads and had it all wrong about Jesus; at least that's what he says in his epistles! While I am not asserting the truth of any of Brown's particular claims or plot devices, what IS important is the search for truth. If we know anything of God at all, it is that God is truth. And the "cut and dried" version that the Vatican presents is most certainly NOT the truth.
For example, if priests are literally Jesus on earth, then how can ANY priest be a pedophile? If popes are infallible, then why have they been wrong about matters of faith and morals, and even declared heretics by later generations? Is believing in the American system of government (separation of church an state) in FACT a heresy, as stated and reaffirmed in the Syllabus of Errors? And what about the Malleus Maleficarium, where the pope expressly gave German bishops the authority to kill in the name of God?
This is a great job of turning a book into a successful movie. I hope the legacy of this movie, once the furor dies down, is the emergence of a more sane view of Christianity, a faith that centers on the spiritual experience of the common man, rather than the terrible self-contradictory "just shut up and do as we say" power-trip that the Vatican has promoted for so long.
Or, in other words: Don't fear God... Fear men who can justify doing evil in God's name.