Snooze Fest ... ZzzZZzzZzZzz

Rating: 1/10 (12 February 2012)

Wowzer !! Sorry Scorcese, you finally let me down in a huge(o) way. This film was a complete snooze fest from about 5 minutes in all the way to the anticlimactic ending.
Where do I start? Well, lets just say that the movie doesn't make anything clear. It does not have any exposition dialog informing us what Hugo's mission and desire is. We are shown flashbacks of a soon to be dead father and a mechanical robot, and somehow are supposed to relate the two together and care about them. Somehow this mechanical robot is deeply rooted in Hugo and his father's life, yet we are never told why this is.
What this movie was missing was a cliché, but desperately needed narration (voiceover) by Hugo himself. Throughout the entire movie, I could care less about Hugo's struggle to fix the mechanical robot. There was nothing at stake .. so what if Hugo fails at his mission to fix the robot? Am I really supposed to cry about this failure? What Hugo should have been trying to do was get himself out of the terrible, homeless, and impoverished life that he was living. Instead, the whole notion of using time as a symbol, was overwhelming the story. In nearly every frame, there is a picture of a clock, or a ticking sound, and quite frankly, it gets annoying quick.
Yes, the visuals are absolutely stunning and the environment Scorcese creates it's breathtaking, reminiscent to Scorcese's Gangs of New York, where every extra or character is dressed perfectly with the set or time period they were in. Other then that? Ehh ... there is no heart, depth, or emotion rooted in the story. Maybe it was the actor, Asa Butterfield, who simply couldn't command screen presence or likability or endearing qualities to him. But usually, even an actor cannot completely tarnish an entire film with such great potential to it.
There are some redeeming qualities to this picture, but as a whole, the film comes off as flat, forced and melodramatic. It is hollow and tries to be dramatic, but fails to deliver the goods due to bad storytelling and screen writing.
Scorcese tried to salvage what he could, and capitalize on what little greatness there is in the visuals and setting, but in the end, Hugo will be remembered as having an insane amount of potential that never lived up to the billing.