Can't Argue with Its Message, Even If I Didn't Warm Much to the Movie

Rating: 7/10 (20 January 2012)

Martin Scorsese takes a stab at making a film children can enjoy, and the results are.....mixed.
If the entire film had been as enchanting as the first five minutes, "Hugo" would really have been something special. As it is, it's infused with a love of cinema, and particularly the joy to be found in discovering and preserving the history of the art form. And for that reason alone, I, an avid movie buff myself, am thrilled that this film exists. However, I didn't find myself warming to it all that much in any other regard. It's a bit slow and one-note -- the loneliness of Hugo, the little boy at the film's center, is brought home adequately within the film's first fifteen minutes, but it's another hour or so of movie before the plot progresses past that. Frankly, it's a bit grueling to watch a little boy missing his dead father for an hour. Once the meat of the film begins to develop, and Hugo and his friend discover that they are in the company of none other than film pioneer Geroges Melie (played by Ben Kingsley), the love of cinema comes practically pouring off of the screen and things improve somewhat.
Still, there is a lot of business involving Sacha Baron Cohen and other denizens of the train station in which Hugo lives and which serves as the film's principal setting that is tiresome. Cohen plays his character like he's a villain from an animated Disney movie, which is completely incongruous with the rest of the film, and wonderful actors like Emily Mortimer, Richard Griffiths and Frances de la Tour are introduced only to torment us with the fact that they are given barely any screen time and nothing to do with the time they're given.
"Hugo" looks lovely, and if you're going to see a 3-D movie this would be the one. But I've decided I could do without 3-D. The technology supposedly brings a heightened level of realism to the film-going experience, but I always find that it does just the opposite; things looks unnatural and awkwardly placed in relation to one another.
Grade: B+