We went last night to see The Da Vinci Code, for reasons which are too complicated to go into here. Much to my surprise it was actually not too bad. I mean, it was a load of cheesy old nonsense of course, but not bad in a "Must.. claw... out... eyes!" kind of way. I haven't read the book, but it seemed like the main thing that people complained about in that (the dreadful writing) had been pretty effectively filtered out, barring the odd stretch of clunky dialogue.
It was interesting to see the way that Brown had drawn on the source material. I'm pretty familiar with it, having done a fair chunk of UNEXPLAINED around the Priory of Sion etc, and it seemed to me that he had gone about cherry-picking his desired elements and constructing his plot in a very game-like manner. Puzzles and other thinky bits reveal the reasons to move between episodic encounters, key NPCs undergo the familiar arcs of trust / enmity, the characters' expectations are regularly overturned, and the encounters themselves are a classic mix of waffly exposition and combat relying on implausible odds to survive. Is Dan Brown a gamer? Inquiring minds demand to know.
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