English sight, French taste, and American stink

Rating: 5/10 (25 February 2012)

The positioning is vague, Hugo is definitely not a film for children just because 2 kids star in it. If kids liked this movie, I am sure they loved Titanic too! It's a movie out and out for film-making lovers who know or are curious of the film history. Scorsese tried to give us a ride into the past using clips of earliest of the films but somehow the nostalgia wasn't created enough. The storyline is more or less a Brit drama. Cinematography is brilliant in the first 2 scenes which coupled up with seamless editing and fx but blame the DI team for inconsistent saturation and contrast throughout the film. In the predictive story element, the relationship between film-making, automaton, magic tricks, and mechanical toys have been established but somehow it shows the convenience of the script writers who totally dealt with under-developed characters till the very end. They also didn't seem to understand that there's a difference between artistic storytelling and drag which made the film terribly slow in the first half. It looked like a couple of good-to-have (as opposed to must-have) scenes were just added externally to display 3D special effects workmanship that were barely palatable. Actors were flawless. The film-title at start may be clichéd but the background score at end credits is lovely. Hugo is in talks only because of "Scorsese", rest everything, the kids, 3D, graphics, history, is plain effective marketing. I may have expected more from a Scorsese movie, but Hugo didn't even reach up to my average expectations from cinema.