User Reviews

"Cracking the Da Vinci Code" is just like every other one of those documentaries on the so called controversial book "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown. This documentary takes you to all the places mentioned in the book and bores the living daylights out of you. I didn't want to hear authors blabbing on about the whole controversy. It's getting annoying. The Worst Part of this Documentary will definitely have to be the expert interviews. I always had to fast-forward past them because i wanted to remain alive after the documentary ended. Simon Ocx has done a poor performance with this and i don't know why i spent $30 on the DVD when i will never watch the stupid thing again.

The Only Good Part is seeing the paintings and the buildings. I don't care about what experts say.

Previous comments on this documentary have been quite negative, but they were obviously looking to be entertained not informed. While it is a bit dry, the information is good and worth seeing. The book is great and I look forward to the movie with Tom Hanks. This piece is helping me prepare to enjoy that movie more by showing the places, artwork, and other items that will be portrayed in the movie and appeared in the book. Also read Brown's other books if you want to get a bit of his preparation for this book. I like the way he thinks and tells a story, even if the story is a whopper. This documentary is not a "Bowling for Columbine" nor any other of Michael Moore's pseudo-documentary "Let's make a Buck while telling them it's the truth" hogwash. Thank God! Documentary films are supposed to be informative and accurate, not necessarily controversial or entertaining.

Hey, Simon Cox, don't give up your day job. The most boring documentary I've ever seen! It may have been the droning, monotone voice of the male narrator reading a continuous snaggle of dates and names from medieval times that became a sleep-inducing hum. Or it could have been the weird music on the front channel that overwhelmed some of the commentary which, btw, was so poorly written it would have taken an Olivier to make it pop. Or it could have been the home-movie-quality of the cinematography. I've seen documentaries using still photos and art that had more life. Interviews with so-called experts consisted of much high-faluting vocabulary about "possibilities." The only exception was the woman author of a book about the Templars, who was the only reason I hung in to the end. She at least had something interesting to say for the few minutes she was on camera. There is nothing to recommend this film which is astonishing considering the subject is so fascinating. One star for the few random tidbits I picked up about DaVinci. I got this as a free rental so at least no money was wasted. I would have demanded a refund otherwise.

If you're not one of the 450 trillion* people who have read Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, for the purposes of this review you should know that it is an adventure/thriller in the tradition of The Celestine Prophecy that unearths a conspiracy theory surrounding the church and the falsification of history, specifically Jesus Christ's mantle as the only son of God. Some of Brown's book is based in fact, and it's this which documentary Cracking the Da Vinci Code sets out to explore.

An interesting premise soon turns to farce as a bunch of unwashed intellectuals make fanciful interpretations of Leonardo Da Vinci's artworks, then move beyond the borders of common sense by claiming the carved cubes in a Scottish church might actually be a code that unlocks the truth about the Christian religion. It's so wacky, you almost expect them to burst out laughing – but nope, they're deadly serious. Adding insult to idiocy, the Yank narrator mispronounces "Thames" and "Edinburgh".

It's entirely possible that Christianity was adulterated somewhere along the line for nefarious purposes, but this undergraduate fairy story takes us no closer to discovering the truth – or anything else.

*This may not be the exact number, but it's probably pretty close.

OK, so who hasn't read "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown? If you haven't then try to because the novel is an amazing read. Everybody's talking about it. Yes, Ron Howard (director of A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13, the Grinch) is even going to make a movie out of it starring Tom Hanks. Many scholars, academics and religious figures are talking about the novel (with a mixture of positive and negative comments) and if you've read the novel you know why.

Simon Cox tries to delve into the history and truth of the controversial facts presented in Brown's novel. He shows us the places and paintings that appear in the novel that many of the readers of the book found fascinating to know more about. Now, I love the novel and I wanted to know more about it, but to God's honest truth, Cox does not do a very good job of this documentary in regards to what he's trying to claim to present as in delving "Inside the Da Vinci Code". Yes, there are some interesting facts that are conveyed, but it's all very poorly executed. To put it down to one word... B-O-R-I-N-G. Don't bother with this documentary if you've already seen Bowling For Columbine or Super Size Me because if you have seen these your expectations of documentaries, I believe, would be high right about now. This documentary will bore the pants off you. It bore it off me. And once I had finished watching it I was so angry. I had hardly understood Cox's thesis of this documentary and wondered why he did it in the first place if he knew he was going to make it as boring as it is. Yes, the info would have been very interesting if it were showed in a more entertaining manner. But this documentary does nothing to help in learning more about the Da Vinci code. Trust me. Don't bother.

Everyone loves a mystery right? Well that I guess was my excuse for watching this, but within about fifteen minutes I had come to realize my decision was misguided.

For a start the production values are shoddy - crappy electronic music that is supposed to set a sinister mood but only succeeds in annoying and budget cinematography.

But these problems could have been overcome if the documentary (I hesitate to call it that, its really like a piece of fan worship for a mediocre novel, much like an amateur fan website) if it had any credible evidence or a coherent narrative.

The "experts" interviewed were very scant and seemed to lack any academic credentials. Often they would say things like "this could mean that" or "this must mean this" when what they really had was a lack of anything remotely approaching evidence.

This is a documentary for the type of people who are convinced there is scientific basis for astrology. It could have been a lot better if it had been an analysis of the legends of the knights templar and the priory of sion.

My wife and I both read the book recently, and were quite intrigued by the topics presented in it. We were quite happy to obtain some visual information about it, so clearly, a documentary should have been a great mechanism for that. And one titled "Cracking(!) the code", at that (good title, although the book does a good job at cracking that code, anyhow.) Too bad we hadn't read the comments on this site, but at least we only wasted $5 on this movie on Pay-Per-View, not $30 on the DVD as the previous commentator. Pretty soon we were scratching our heads in frustration at this amateur, annoying time-waster. This movie was so bad it wasn't even funny.

It's not just that most of the movie shows sitting, blabbing experts, they are rather incomprehensible at that. The "um, ah, ahem"-peppered speech will do that, but the background music, louder than the voices, doesn't help. Most of them repeated themselves or the others. Each of the two experts interviewed together actually seemed bored, if not tranquillized, when the other spoke. One expert must have been recorded using a camcorder, which was occasionally trained up close and personal on his rings or his legs. And the worst thing: They barely said anything we hadn't read in the book. The only useful bits were the indications of which 'facts' in Brown's book were actually fiction.

The movie also included footage of several places mentioned in the book, as well as some of the classical masterpieces. That was interesting, but quite marred by the post-production transition effects: pictures were "moved out", the screen flickered black, then new pictures moved in, as if in an old-style slideshow. The net effect was nothing short of annoying.

We don't know who Simon Cox is but we got to see him in the movie. For a long time. We didn't quite care to see him declaim to the camera for minutes on end. And there was also a narrator! Bottom line: If you haven't read the book, this movie wouldn't advance your knowledge, and is a rather expensive and confusing sleeping pill. If you have read it, enjoy the fiction and save your time for more enjoyable pursuits than watching this.