Beautiful visually with no substance trying hard to be deep and meaningful

Rating: 5/10 (26 October 2014)

Hugo is a very strange movie. Visually, the movie is truly glorious, amazing sets, fantastic to look at and beautifully filmed. Based loosely on real events, nonetheless, as usual certain facts were changed to suit the movie makers.
The child actors were very good; Ben Kingsley, who I usually think is wonderful, looked as if he suffered chronic constipation throughout the entire thing and the script was really quite terrible.
I have a vague suspicion that if half of the movie had been edited out and left on the cutting room floor it might have been wonderful. It appears that the director thought that deep, meaningful glances which went on for 10 seconds too long while the camera explored the pores of the actors faces was acting, and that some truly weird, weird, weird script portions were to be humour. Neither angle on movie making did it for me.
For the life of me I could not figure out if this was meant to be a kid's movie, or a farce of some kind or an adults movie with central roles acted by children, or a movie about a renowned movie maker or automatons or deep and meaningful themes about humanity or trains.
I loved and adored looking at it. I thought the child actors were charming, particularly the girl and no one else even vaguely appealed to me and seriously, whatever Ben Kingsley was doing I'll never feel the same about him again, he was so bad that if I didn't know he was a fine actor I might have thought he paid someone to be in the flick.
I'd recommend it for great visuals if say, you also want to sit with the volume turned down and do your homework or chat with friends.