"What really matters is what you believe."
Featured in: Angels and Demons, The Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol
Portrayed by: Tom Hanks
*SPOILERS for Angels and Demons, The Da Vinci Code, and The Lost Symbol*
.
The main character of three of Dan Brown's novels and the most famous symbologist this side of Star Ocean, Robert Langdon is Dan Brown's author avatar in the three books in which he appears. A Gary Stu to be sure, but one with interesting layers and hidden depths that I felt made him the perfect protagonist for a trio of compelling novels. He's an awkward Indiana Jones, a socially-stunted James Bond, who can solve coded, cryptic puzzles with his mind but is clearly shown not to have all the answers, sometimes even when it counts. As is par for the course in these types of stories and with these types of characters, attractive women seem to be drawn to him, and it's fun to watch some of the awkward moments play out as the professor is thrust into situation after situation almost totally beyond his control. He rarely solves his problems with physical force, though he is prone to knocking people about the head in a pinch (it's quite funny when he has to resort to such tactics). Some may be surprised that I quite enjoy this Gary Stu (hell, some may be surprised that I enjoy these books which I admit are the equivalent of literary junk food), but he's got more awkward moments than most, he's in abject terror for 90% of the novels, and usually it's not even him who saves the day, such as when he and Katharine Solomon are kidnapped and trapped in The Lost Symbol and it's the FBI (or CIA, I forgot) who have to come to their rescue. Langdon's most heartwarming moments come not when he's romancing women (again, most of THOSE moments are awkward and are instigated by the female in those situations), but when he's experiencing moments of soul-searching clarity. Robert Langdon isn't a religious man, but he isn't QUITE an atheist either (I'd compare his viewpoints politically to someone like Trey Parker), and it's really compelling to see him open up at certain points in the novels and admit that there are things that he can never know about no matter how much research he does. In the Da Vinci Code movie, the last fifteen minutes of which are fantastic in my opinion, he admits to Sophie that when he was trapped in a well as a young boy, that he indeed prayed to Jesus that he would be saved, and that he has no way to know what's human or what's divine, offering up the quote I used for him. Then of course there's that moment at the end of the movie and of the book, where he realizes that Mary Magdalene is buried beneath the Louvre (a scene done beautifully in the movie, set to Hans Zimmer's excellent score) and goes to kneel above her grave. While Robert Langdon may indeed be Dan Brown's mouthpiece/wish fulfillment device, I couldn't help but be endeared to him over the course of three admittedly entertaining novels, and I couldn't think of a better protagonist for those books.
--
I chose poorly. Black Turtle chose wisely.