TDVC's reception at Cannes wasn't good, and the Cannes crowd doesn't exactly consist of a bunch of Opus Dei applicants. The movie might simply be bad.
The Cannes audience clearly grew restless as the movie dragged on to two and a half hours and spun a long sequence of anticlimactic revelations.
"I kept thinking of the Energizer Bunny, because it kept going and going and going, and not in a good way," said James Rocchi, a film critic for CBS 5 television in San Francisco and the online outlet Cinematical. "Ron Howard makes handsome films. He doesn't make bad ones, but he doesn't make great ones."
One especially melodramatic line uttered by Hanks drew prolonged laughter and some catcalls, and the audience continued to titter for much of the film's remainder.
If this thing bombs, what will the news people say? Vatican kills movie? Howard kills book? Brown is blue?
Doesn't really matter. The book has done its damage. The souls of millions of the historically ignorant (and, therefore, easily swayed) will be lost. On the intellectual level, one wants to think, "They're nimrods. No great lost." But we know from revelation that God desires salvation for everyone, even (especially?) the nimrods. That's the real tragedy of TDVC.
