A Hugo Spectacular

Rating: 6/10 (15 December 2011)

One of my favorite movies-going experiences is to go into the theatre barely knowing ANYTHING of the film I'm about to see. It's a rare occasion, since I've studied film since I was probably 10ish. With Hugo, I CHOOSE not to read too much about it and the one trailer I saw was months ago, I believe. All I heard from critics I admire, was I needed to see it in the theatre and with Real 3D. So, I went with almost zero knowledge of what I was about to see. Heck, from the preview I slightly remembered, I thought it was another Polar Express-type animated film.
Wrong. On the Polar Express part, of course. Though, the opening segment confirmed what I thought I remembered – it did sure as Hades look like a CGI'd/digital world. Then we see little Hugo, all real-life like and the movie continues in the real world.
Oh, and what an opening it was! Exciting, fun, adventurous, thrilling and inventive. I knew the movie was over two hours – only because I was trying to coordinate a double feature of this and The Descendants, but alas this went on far too long – and I truly believed the rest of the movie would be an amazing spectacle of lights, sounds and wondrous adventure.
And then the plots sank in. Yes, I meant to pluralize that.
The movie started on Plot A and that was fine, but then Plot B overlapped with Plot C, followed by D-G. I'm aware this is based on a novel, but it felt like 3 novels rolled into this one.
Please don't take this as a complaint, per se, but I thought the movie worked much smoother when you have the awe of the spectacular graphics and grand sets with a simple even-kids-can-follow peaceful and harmonizing story. And because there's too much going on, too many subplots, the movie's pacing slowed to an almost halt and I started to feel every bit of the over two-hour run time.
Sad, I was really getting invested and would have been more alert if they saved some ideas for a potential sequel and kept it to a quaint 90 or so minutes.
That all said, if you're interested, you really should see this on the big screen. It's a marvel of ingenuity and it's fully worthy of a Best Cinematography Award. The performances are outstanding at times and the touching transformations (in some of the plots I favored more) were nice and heartfelt. And finally, there was some pretty good comedy that made me laugh out loud, mostly from Sacha Baron Cohen.
If you are ever interested in seeing this, see it now. In the theatres, in Real 3D. You wont regret the experience.