This book seemed the best of the three to me. The storyline was fairly quickly paced, and at times, truly fascinating! I bought it, and continue to reread it.

kinda good.

The success of the book is that it is a page-turner despite the plot being quite convoluted and contrived; the book is well thought-out. A story that took 454 pages to tell simply cannot be telescoped into two and a half hours. The script is crammed with information, yet there's very little room for humor or breathing spaces or characterizations that are very thin. Brown imagined his hero, Robert Langdon, a Harvard historian and symbolgist.

He finds himself involved in a deadly web of conspiracy when an old man ends up murdered in the Louvre. A set of cryptic clues are left behind, leading Langdon to join forces with police cryptologist Sophie Neveu the grand daughter of the murdered old man. Together, they evade the cops and other religious zealots into the reasons behind what ends up being a series of mysterious murders, the answers to which threaten to rewrite over two millennia of religious history and faith.

While they're busy solving riddles, uncovering a conspiracy and avoiding entanglements with the police, they're also on the run because Langdon is the prime murder suspect. The pair keeps getting into problems, escaping, and then getting double-crossed. Silas dominates his movie scenes as the serial-killer monk, Silas, who tortures himself and carries out murders ordered by the Mafia-like fundamentalist Catholic group, Opus Dei. The movie is most alive when Langdon and Teabing are discussing their opposing viewpoints and getting quite hot under the collar about the validity of each other's version of Christian history.

Unfortunately, most of the other talking-heads scenes threaten to bring the movie to a halt, even when they're supplemented by abstract, color-drained illustrations of ancient Rome, witch-burnings, other phantoms or hocus-pocus. As the characters discuss conspiracies and anagrams and the hidden meanings in religious art, you wonder why they don't seem to realize they're on the run and they don't have a lot of time. The movie may seem even harder than the book on Opus Dei, perhaps because Silas' bloody behavior is so much more graphic on film. His murder of a devout nun is especially nasty. By minimizing locations, losing unnecessary characters, deleting repetitive plotting, and contracting time, The Da Vinci Codes screen play writer Goldsman makes Dan Brown's story easier to digest. What Goldsman can't change too much are the ingredients of the novel's plot, but he can try and make them more pleasant.

The ending of the film was the best part. Not in a "thank god, it's over" kind of way, but the ending in the book has the resurrection of people previously thought dead. That was uncalled for, but it added a certain surprise to the viewer. How cheated would you feel if Harry Potter's parents were really alive after all and had no reason whatsoever for pretending to be dead? Goldsman keeps the essence of that storyline but ignores the small details and makes it more poignant and true to the characters.

The best parts of were ones that had little or nothing to do with Langdon, Sophie, or any other character in the film. The real meat of it is that, for millions of readers out there of Brown's book, this was the first time that the very compelling questions about the divinity of Jesus, the origins of Christianity, the power of the Catholic Church, were talked about in such a fascinating and interesting fashion. It might all be nonsense, but within the construct of the novel, you believe every word of it. By sucking out the bulk of the colorful material, what we have left is an occasionally interesting mystery that dishes up many interesting ideas that aren't really given their proper respect.

The book "The Da Vinci Code" is hard for a young mind as they have too many plots playing at one time. For example, there is a saga on Silas's murders and then another saga on Robert and Sophie on the run and then the plots some how come together.

The movie was made well considering it had 454 pages to cover in a couple of hours. I can honestly say with the small details left out in the movie and the amazing storyline that the movie was a great cinematic experience.

Leaves you gripping to find out what's going to happen next. I tried solving some of the puzzles, but it was too hard. A definite recommendation :)
Book was better than the movie.