Interesting, but not the book -- and it could have been!

Rating: 5/10 (24 May 2006)

Spoilers! Anyone who is interested in reading these lines has either read the book or seen the film or both.
In essence, my emotion was one of disappointment. There were too many small and unnecessary changes in the film version that did not need to be removed for the sake of the story or for brevity. In fact, I would have loved to see a longer film that was truer to the book.
Here are just a few of my complaints about the film:

There was no need for Jacques SauniÃ¨re to be excluded from being Sophie's grandfather. It depersonalized the story and removed the sexual tension that Sophie discovered as a young woman, when she witnessed her grandfather and grandmother making love in the sexual rite. This led to Sophie's alienation from her grandfather and was a crucial issue in the story.

Why exclude the love story of Sophie and Langdon? Part of the "cashing in" in this story was the fact that the two principals fell in love with each other, and I became engrossed in that angle of the story -- which was excluded completely from the film!

In the film, Sophie was portrayed as a dumb woman, when her intellect was, in the book, critical to the story and served to make it work.

Bezu Fache, the Captain of the French Judicial Police, was portrayed in the film as a collaborator with Manuel Aringarosa, the Opus Dei Bishop. This changed the nature of their characters completely, and it affected the tone of the story.

In summary, this book reads like a script; why wasn't it used that way, even if the film would have been 3 hours long or more? It would have been worth it to see the book made into film, not a completely different story.