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The Dictator

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Packed with atmosphere, this old-fashioned but deftly told ghost story delivers ample chills and thrills.

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The Adventures Of Tintin (Film)

by Joshua Blackman | December 19, 2011 17:40 | Edited December 19, 2011 17:41

Storytelling is by-the-numbers and the characters are often rendered superficial, but the real draw here is the truly exhilarating visual spectacle Spielberg’s created.

Steven Spielberg fluttered fanboy hearts this year by making his first appearance at the San Diego Comic-Con, which is Mecca for anyone partial to geek and film culture. He was there with producer Peter Jackson to present footage from his first animated feature, The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn, an adaptation of Hergé's famed graphic novels. While fans typically clamoured towards the master's endless catalogue of classic movies, audience questions eventually turned to Tintin, and the director's use of "motion-capture" - the latest CGI-tech where actors don a skintight body suit in order to have their performance rendered electronically. Avatar and Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes have recently made superb use of this technique, but tall blue aliens and chimps are one thing - what about depicting actual humans?

 

Robert Zemeckis attempted it awkwardly in The Polar Express and Beowulf, and Spielberg seems to have learnt from his protege's mistakes by making his characters just stylised enough to offset the insane accuracy of their features. You can see the muscles ripple and the sweat flow, but teenage hero Tintin himself seems deliberately muted in order to get closer to Hergé's original art. His facial expressions, impressive technically but not emotionally, are easily the weakest part of The Adventures Of Tintin, which is an otherwise enjoyable gung-ho adventure that recalls the director's Indiana Jones roots. There are so many indirect callbacks to Raiders Of The Lost Ark here that one half expects the parched map to appear as Tintin and Haddock set off on their globe-trotting travels.

 

Culling from three of Hergé's books (The Secret Of The Unicorn, The Crab With The Golden Claws and Red Rackham's Treasure), the story finds investigative reporter Tintin (Jamie Bell) and his intrepid canine companion, Snowy, on the trail of Ivanovich Sakharine (Daniel Craig), a nasty man on the hunt for at least two model sailing ships that hold some kind of secret. Tintin is abducted by Sakharine after buying one of the ships from a street merchant, despite the best efforts of two largely useless detectives, Thompson and Thomson (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost), who sport canes and John Steed bowler hats. Imprisoned on a cargo ship but with no Marion Ravenwood in sight, Tintin bonds with the ship's alcoholic former captain, Haddock, who's perpetually trashed and always on hand with a Steven Moffat/Edgar Wright/Joe Cornish scripted zinger. In contrast to Tintin's boy-scout goodness, Haddock is broken and aimless when we first meet him, and thanks in part to a strong performance by mo-cap veteran Andy Serkis, he becomes the film's most memorable character.

 

The duo escape and team up to hunt for the mysterious Unicorn, a 17th century ship lost at sea that has some connection to one of Haddock's distant relatives. This sets the scene for one of the film's most ingenious set-pieces - a seamless flashback to an epic pirate battle on the high seas, which creatively puts the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies to shame.

 

It's easy to forgive that the film is somewhat rote story-wise, and even that it wimps out at the end to set up the promised sequel, because the real draw here is the spectacle. Free from the constraints of real sets and the laws of physics, it's as if Spielberg has set out to create the most bonkers action movie imaginable. The resulting chases feel like a combination of Indiana Jones and a Road Runner cartoon. Intricate and thrilling, Spielberg's camera swoops and dives through walls in an exhilarating display of showmanship, punctuated with the kind of mischievous humour that's a hallmark of the director's lighter work. Thankfully, the frequent humour never approaches the self-indulgent opulence that drowned 1941; even the Jaws reference here feels cute and earned.

 

Ultimately, the most salient aspect of Tintin is its playful spirit. Bouncing along to composer John Williams' jazzy Catch Me If You Can-style rhythms and Indy-derived statements of heroism, Spielberg zestfully hops between exotic locales. So much so that the finale comes off a little trite in the wake of an all-out sequence, set in the fictional Moroccan port of Bagghar, featuring evil eagles, motorcycle sidecars, and bazookas. Surprisingly, the bright, effective 3-D does the film a favour. Animation is one of the few cases where 3-D has been more successful than not, and the results here are crisp and deliberately composed for as much negative depth as possible. 3-D that doesn't want to make you claw your eyes out? Believe it.

 

Despites the film's technical virtuosity, however, it rarely operates on more than a superficial level. Daniel Craig's villain doesn't get enough airtime to register, and Tintin himself, who mutters plot points and frequently exclaims "Great snakes!" seems swamped in his own movie. He's upstaged even by his dog, who gets in fights with his neighbour's cat, topples henchmen, and always seems to know a secret entrance or two. Nonetheless, this Tintin is a peerless example of a master filmmaker let loose with new technology. It turns out that you can teach an old dog new tricks...