Spielberg doesn't understand Tintin

Rating: 6/10 (2 March 2016)

Minor spoilers ahead.
While impressive on a technical level, this big-screen-adaptation of the Tintin-adventures fails to capture the essence of Hergé's brilliant creation.
The problem is "tone". What was, in its comic-form, a semi-realistic detective-story for adolescent boys has been turned into a cartoon-y slapstick-fest aimed at preschoolers.
Tintin of the comics existed in a semi-realistic world. Yes: There were moments of silliness and convenient coincidences, but generally speaking, the world Hergé created adhered to a kind of realism and seriousness. And that's precisely why I loved the comics growing up. Here were tales your parents would let you read, but which treated you and your intelligence with a kind of "respect" rarely found in other kid-friendly comics.
Not so in the movie, which bombards you with one wacky, mind-numbing action-scene after the other and dumbs down its story and characters to appeal to 6-year-olds.
Let's just take a couple of examples: The Unicorn "dream-sequence" of the comics was presented as a realistic sea-battle - in the movie it looks more like something out of a Looney Tunes-skit. With burning ships getting lifted from the sea, people performing impossible feats of athleticism, etc. All of which defies any sort of real-world-physics.
Characterization - for example: The Thompson-twins. These two were never a favorite of mine in the comics either, but the movie takes their stupidity even beyond slapstick-levels - as evidenced in their scene in Mr. Silk's apartment. Sure: In the comics, these two guys were mostly incompetent and naive - but in the film they act like a pair of lobotomized chimps.
Tintin's and Haddock's escape on the plane. In the comic, this was a pretty intense and disturbing scene. Haddock was acting like a borderline psycho, trying to knock Tintin out because he wanted to fly the plane himself. In the film, it's just another collection of physically impossible stunts, ending with Haddock belching into the plane's gas-tank. Seriously?
Which brings me to my next point of criticism and that is a lack of restraint on the part of the film-makers. Yes: a film done entirely in CG gives you incredible freedom. You can place your camera anywhere you want to, you can have characters perform incredible, physics-defying stunts. But in Tintin, they've taken these two "advantages" so far that it actually hurts the movie overall. When your hero survives one impossible stunt-sequence after the other, the novelty of it all wears off pretty quickly. Consequently, we stop caring - because we've seen him survive this sort of stuff over and over again, so why should be get invested when the 10th such sequence comes along?
Lastly I have to address the poor choices in screen writing. Even though this film is called "Secret of the Unicorn" it throws elements of at least one more adventure into the mix ("The Crab with the Golden Claws"). I can see why they did this in order to have Tintin meet Haddock, but I can't help but wonder why they chose either "Unicorn" or "Crab" as starting points in the first place.
Neither are exactly among the stronger Tintin-stories - a fact which the screenwriters seem to acknowledge themselves by switching tons of details around like cutting characters or transforming a minor character from the comic into the film's main villain.
6/10 - mostly for its technical strengths and to acknowledge the relative "audacity" of adapting a comic-series that's probably not very widely known in the US.