8. Foucaults Pendulum; Umberto Eco
A game of conspiracy theorizing goes too far amongst the intellectual elite of Europes secret societies. Eco takes us on a rollercoaster ride of esoteric learning and half-truths. Filled with high-brow conundrums and all washed down in a sea of high-falutin verbiage, Foucaults Pendulum is a bit like a thinking mans Da Vinci Code-though its hard to see this being turned into a film. The archplot is perhaps filmable enough and may even be construed as a reasonable thriller about ecclesiastical wrong-doings and the addictive nature of being caught up in a game .But the novel isnt really about the archplot at all. As with so much of Eco, he fills his pages with abstractions about science and theology and just about every other esoteric strain of academia youd expect from a professor of semiotics. To turn this into a thriller film would require a sacrificing of all this filler and internal learning. True, Eco has been tackled before. But whereas The Name of the Rose was a highbrow, ecunemical whodunit, Foucaults Pendulum is plain old nuts. And its worth reminding ourselves that the film of the Name of the Rose was nowhere near what the book was. Ecos Island of the Day Before might provide better movie fare.