2 stars (out of four)
Steven Spielberg built his career on turning his boyhood
fantasies into Hollywood blockbusters. When you watch the most imaginative of
his big-budget adventures – Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, Minority Report – you
get the sense that a young Spielberg might have made the same movie had he had
the technical skills and financing at his disposal the adult Spielberg does.
The same is true of his buddy, George Lucas. At some gut level just they knew
the stories in their heads, full of dashing heroes and journeys to exotic
worlds, would make fine crowd-pleasers.
So the pairing of Mr. Spielberg and Peter Jackson, that Kiwi
who had the crazy idea he could turn The Lord of the Rings into a trilogy of hit movies, makes sense. They
share a mutual love of the French comic book series, The Adventures
of Tintin, and set out to recreate on the
big screen the rich, vibrant world they had already known for years. Mr.
Spielberg would direct the first and, should it be a hit, Mr. Jackson would
helm the second installment.
The Adventures of Tintin,
which was filmed with motion-capture animation and released in 3D, seems to
have all the right ingredients – a boy and his dog discover a clue to a mystery
and embark on a globetrotting trek to solve it – but the movie fails to capture
the magic that seems so effortless in other Spielberg films.
The boy is Tintin (Jamie Bell) and the clue is a cryptic
piece of parchment concealed inside a model ship he bought secondhand from a street vendor. He might have known the purchase would spark trouble
after a man named Ivan Sakharine (Daniel Craig) tries to buy the ship off
Tintin. Sakharine needs only to utter a few words in Mr. Craig’s ominous,
British drawl for us to know he’s the Bad Guy and Tintin wisely keeps the ship
for himself, sensing an opportunity for adventure.
And how right he is! Before he knows it, Sakharine kidnaps
him and he is onboard a real ship where he meets a drunken sea captain, Haddock
(Andy Serkis). Haddock and Sakharine have a longstanding feud that is
apparently news to Haddock; their ancestors were rival pirates and Sakharine’s
relative cursed Haddock’s after the latter robbed him of his gold. Or
something.
The plot details in these sorts of movies are more-or-less
irrelevant as long the story takes our heroes from Land A to Land B and back
again, which The Adventures of Tintin
does. As it turns out, the parchment features as series of cryptic symbols
along the bottom that can only be understood when read with two other notes,
also hidden inside model ships. So we begin in Europe, where the first two
ships are, then hop over to Morocco where the third is. The intervening trip
involves travel by boat, plane and motorcycle and there is no shortage of dazzling
animated action sequences.
So where does Tintin
go wrong? To be honest, I’m at a bit of a loss to say but let’s start with the
animation, which, on a surface level, is stunning. How an animator is able to
recreate the look of a rainy street or the sun glistening off ocean waves in
such a way that looks somehow better than the real thing, I’ll never know. The
movie also looks great in 3D; the animation is crisp and sharp, and the added
effect of the 3D is seamless.
But the inhabitants of this digital world have an odd
quality about them. Because the actual physical performances of actors are
being used through motion-capture, the characters of Tintin move like real people. Yet they remain cartoonish;
they have big heads, exaggerated features and curvy, rubbery bodies. The
strangeness of this look is especially noticeable in the film’s comedy, which
is mostly broad and slapstick. The antics of a pair of bumbling coppers (Simon
Pegg and Nick Frost) are limited by the use of real actors. They appear to be
cartoon characters but because their bodies have none of the elasticity of say,
Wild E. Coyote when he steps off a cliff, their movements appear curiously
stiff.
This creepy middle ground between animated people and the
real thing kept the movie at a distance for me. A scene such as a motorcycle
chase through a Moroccan town, shown in one long take, is breathtaking but also
not as exciting as it should be. There is too much of a sense that these are
pixels being cleverly manipulated to look like buildings, boats and boy who
ducks and dives between them. The movie is visually impressive but only
superficially so.
The failings of The Adventures of Tintin are not so great as to shake my faith in Mr.
Spielberg’s talent, but the movie does make me realize how much I take for
granted the action movies of his that do work. My inner child is always eager
to escape into a movie and who knows, maybe Tintin’s next adventure will allow
him to do so.
- Steve Avigliano, 01/02/12
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