If nothing else, this makes the exposition a little bit easier to swallow (which is good, there's a lot of it). In addition to cutting out some of Brown's many, many digressions into completely false historical theory, the film makes the good choice of changing Langdon from a true believer to an agnostic on the matter of the Grail, and changing Sophie into an agnostic on the matter of God. The movie tells a better story than the book. Along the way they are aided by a charmingly insane British Grail historian (Ian McKellan) and hunted by an albino Opus Dei monk (Paul Bettany) with a zest for personal mortification. I can't believe anyone doesn't know the rudiments of the story, but here goes: Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) teams up with French cryptologist Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou) to uncover a secret about the Holy Grail that the Catholic Church wants desperately to keep hidden. Just know that the film had to do a lot to overcome my disdain for the book.
I will not bother going into the reasons why the story offends me many others have done a fine job of documenting how Dan Brown makes a hash of biblical history, theology, Grail mythology, art theory, and French grammar. I will say this in the film's favor it contains much less information than the novel, and therefore it contains many fewer lies. And therefore one of the most unnecessary. At any rate, what I found was one of the most faithful literary adaptations in my memory. I am still not sure if it was a mistake to read the source novel last week, as I did in order to appreciate the point of view of an audience that would largely be comprised of the book's fans.
In this mode we find the latest adaptation of a superblockbuster novel, Ron Howard's film of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. It's especially worth remembering that the first film in that trilogy premiered only a few weeks after Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, an almost tediously unimaginative retread of a book that nearly the entire audience had read multiple times.
LOTR is perhaps the modern cinema's best example of a film that stands for good or bad on its own, despite being based on an infinitely popular novel. If we can safely assume that a book's printedness is a part of what it is (and I see no reason not to so assume), what gets lost, and what added, in the translation from print to screen? The outliers are such works as Contempt and Adaptation., films that primarily derive meaning from how they are not the book they are based on far more common is a film like Jaws, which streamlines and changes and just altogether improves upon the source story, or The Lord of the Rings, which alters, "moviefies" if you will, an already solid and beloved film, leaving some of its themes intact and replacing others. Adaptating a book into a movie must be a tricky thing at the best of times.
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