Cluttered, overbearing, and bloated with its own muchness

Rating: 3/10 (29 December 2013)

I didn't like the movie "Hugo". I can see why many people said Scorsese lost his talent.
After watching it all the way through, I could see the story elements and concepts that conveyed the point of the story. And it was a good point: Life is like a complex machine whose purpose isn't necessarily obvious at any isolated moment, and how we all have a function but sometimes that function is to facilitate someone else's purpose and sometimes it's to pass our purpose onto another person. And even after a set of functions becomes apparent and a bigger purpose is accomplished, the machine keeps rolling forward and we shift into new functions for new purposes, sometimes reawakening previous purposes in a new context.
Except Scorsese really f'ed it up.
The movie was visually ugly. It may have worked on a big theater screen but on TV it was cluttered, overbearing, and bloated with its own muchness. Perhaps in 3D it worked but in 2D it looked gimmicky.
The digital effects were heavy-handed and obvious, poorly matching grain and contrast of the film plates. Old school matte paintings on glass would have fit the period better. Gears and machinery were excessive and gratuitous, other than in the clock towers why were there insane amounts of gigantic gears inside the train station walls? And There was no harmony or flow to how the people and trains moved, for a story about the machinery of life everything should have moved like an intricate dance, instead it was a hodge-podge of random collisions.
The faux red/blue Technicolor effect was gratuitous and botched. Besides being an anachronism relative to the period of the story, the lighting and contrast were all wrong. In 2-color Technicolor, did you ever see anything back-lit or with intense contrast or white glare? No, you did not. 2-color Technicolor had low to medium contrast at best, lighting was even, and white was avoided because it looked sickly.
Ben Kingsley's make-up was an embarrassment. In the flashbacks to when his character Méliès was a movie maker, I couldn't tell if it was a look-alike younger actor under an ill-fitting foam latex mask or a low-res digital overlay on the real Kingsley. And that awful bulbous nose... Yes, Kingsley has a larger nose but between make-up, lighting, and camera positioning it looked like 5 pounds of foam latex covered with Spackle to eliminate every pore or other hint that it might be living flesh. And too often he was shot head-on (for 3D maybe?), making his face look like a lumpfish.
Another big problem was that the Hugo character was unlikeable from the start. In the very first shot when we see him peering through the cut-out clock numbers, he looks like he has fetal alcohol syndrome, dim-witted and clueless. It's hard to shake that first impression. The only time he shows any skill or cleverness is when he fixes the broken clockwork mouse (and even then, the digital effect of the toy mouse in action is annoyingly fake). Other than that, Hugo is clumsy, obvious, and lacks any guile or finesse... the opposite of what you would think an child would become when forced to survive alone hiding in the train station walls.
The story was propelled by a fragile conceit and the movie would have been over in 5 minutes if the principal characters had a lick of common sense. Imagine the former movie maker confronting Hugo at the toy shop this way:
MELIES: Why do you have a notebook full of notes about my automaton? HUGO: It was my father's notebook, we were repairing the automaton together. MELIES: What? You have my automaton? Let's you and I repair it together! (roll end credits)
Too many characters keep secrets that aren't secret at all, or evade answering the simplest of questions for no particular reason. I lost count of the number of times Hugo said "You don't understand!" but never explained anything that would have made sense of his actions.
So many stupid unanswered questions. Why didn't Hugo's drunkard uncle tell the station management that he had to take in his orphaned nephew? Why didn't Hugo tell the Station Master that his uncle, a station employee, had disappeared? Why did the story make it seem as if Hugo had been alone for years when, as we find out later, it was only 2 months? Why didn't the station management notice when the uncle didn't collect his pay for 2 months? Why was Hugo so secretive about the automaton when all he had to say was that it was special to his father and he wanted to keep that memory? Why did the girl refuse to tell Hugo where she got the heart-shaped key? Why did the Méliès' wife freak out over the automaton's drawing and give Hugo the bum's rush when all she had to do was say that it would have brought back painful memories for her husband? Why was it so easy for the wife to say just that after the film historian flattered her looks? Why would a giant glass clock face in a high tower have hinged panes just big enough for a child to squirm through? Why didn't Hugo bring the automaton along with the film historian and the projector when they all visited Méliès' home? Why did no one give Hugo a decent meal or at least a healthy snack?
I could go on all day.
The elements of a very good movie were in there amongst the nonsensical vanity, but the script, director, and designer ruined it. I look forward to the black-and-white real film remake in 10 years by someone who understands that style must never overshadow substance.