Falling from the sky

Books rarely get made into good movies. There have been many successful adaptations, too numerous to recount here, but most of them shared one common trait - the director took liberties with the stories to make a better pictorial account of the happenings. (Read the Godfather and then see the movie and you'll know what I mean - the book's legendary status owes more to the fine work by Francis Ford Coppola, than vice versa).

Ron Howard's predicament is that "The Da Vinci Code" has been read by too many people and that has tied his hands. I have not seen the movie, but I can tell you that it will not be received well by most movie-goers (and critics). Those that have read the book will nitpick the stuff he left out or changed. Those that have not read the book will not understand all the things simply because Howard does not have the time to lecture the audience the way Robert Langdon does in the book. In the end, what we will get is a movie that tries to hit the main points and relies heavily on the star power of the actors on the screen (Hanks, Tautou, McKellen, Reno, Bettany, Molina - to name a few) to pull it through.

I read JRR Tolkein's "The Lord of the Rings" during my trip to India a few years ago. If the book was a Test match, then the trilogy of movies were the highlight packages. JRR Tolkein famously said about his work - "The tale grew in the telling". The movies actually managed to squeeze it back into its skeletal form. An impressive and breath-taking skeleton, but a skeleton of the story, nevertheless.

Unfortunately for Howard, The Da Vinci Code is not a magnum opus for him to make the bones interesting enough. He will be skewered for making the movie. I just hope the huge paycheque he receives will compensate for it.

And yes, I look forward to watching it at the first available opportunity. I just wish the producers had hired Harrison Ford to portray Robert Langdon, especially since Dan Brown himself describes Landon as "Harrison Ford in...tweeds".