The delight of Brown's book was entirely backhanded. "Angels & Demons" was crap, but it was exhilarating crap. He wrote with riveting badness. Langdon was pompous, Brown condescending, and the sentences purple enough to give Prince pause! Watching what Howard has done with the book - covering up the lewdness, blunting the snobbery, and spackling the amazing plot holes - is dismaying.
This adaptation has the stink of superiority about it. It thinks that by deleting all the sex and playing up the theological struggles it's somehow better than the novel. But Brown writes with glee and gusto, like a man who recently discovered that fingers applied to a keyboard produce words. The novel was a 137-chapter typing spree.
