Secret of the Code

B and I saw The Da Vinci Code movie tonight. Unlike seemly most others, I thoroughly enjoyed it. But then, we had both read the book and therein lies the movie's secret.

Ron Howard is a very, very good director. The photography was superb and Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou did solid jobs as the leads. Most criticism has stemmed from the inability to condense the weighty novel onto the big screen. My supposition is that they didn't really try.

The movie would be confusing and fragmented to those who had never read the book. Then again, over 45 million people have read the book. Isn't that a market in its own right? I suggest that the movie was aimed at the proven audience who had read the book, who understood it already and who would like to add Hollywood-style visuals and special effects to their experience of the story. That certainly worked for me.