Too many chases, not enough substance.

Rating: 5/10 (31 January 2012)

If you've read Tintin when you were a child, you'll have high standards for an adaptation. Unluckily, even with the best means available, this film disappoints on many levels.
First the plot is nonexistent. If you take away the chases on ship, land, in the city and the desert, you'll get a story that can be told in one paragraph. This is an action movie, with no regard to story.
Secondly, the images themselves are not at all believable. We understand that nowadays every film has to be 3D or perish, but... I'd have preferred something way simpler, like the "old fashioned" Disney films of I guess the 60s, like Tom & Jerry, Donald Duck, to Thundercats, Transformers etc. 20 years later.
Tintin is not just a funny hairdo who fights down thugs. He's got a humanistic content that's blatantly absent in this movie. Tintin is intrepid but with the mind, not with his fists.
Captain Haddock is way worse. A constant drunkard, this film is basically Tintin's struggle to get him out of this addiction. And rather repetitive at that.
D. Craig as Rackham is way better, but he's not as central in the books as in this film, that already is selling us a sequel before it ends. The Thomsons are OK, I didn't like "Snowy", thought it was too humanized.
"Upcoming" on IMDb has a great positive review; I'm not glad mine cannot be so positive. "Ra-gp" (another user)'s review is right about the technical aspects being fine, like some creative montages. Music by John Williams is of course dutifully fine.
Maybe I was so disappointed because I expected a lot. I don't like motion-capture films like Zemeckis', and I'm afraid this film will win many accolades. Its commercial success doesn't relate to the qualities of the comic book, which just wasn't a cartoon in the American sense of the Spider man, Superman and so on. Summarizing, to put it in PC games' terms, I wanted "Myst", a game of mental riddles and beauty, and got "Counter strike" with a tint of AA/ addiction's recovery.
Disappointing.