"Billions of blue, blustering barnacles!"

Rating: 8/10 (14 October 2012)

There's something odd about the name Tintin. It just doesn't sound complete, does it? No first name, just Tintin. I'm not familiar with the Belgian comic book character on which this film is based, so I'll just have to go with my impressions of the story as I viewed it with no preconceptions.
What you have here for all intents and purposes is an Indiana Jones type adventure with some innovative twists written into the story. With it's emphasis on a fabled Man O' War sailing ship, The Unicorn, there's also a bit of a 'Pirates of the Caribbean' flavor to it as well. The hero Tintin seemed to be a young boy to me, so when I saw him mixing it up with Sakharine's henchmen I had to wonder about that a bit. Apparently the character is a newspaper reporter, so he can't be a kid, but that's still the impression I had throughout most of the story.
The thing about the film's style of CGI had me consider something I hadn't thought of before. You can do a whole lot more with this type of picture than with live action as you're trying to simulate various action aspects of the story. For example, in the chase through Bagghar, it would be impossible to have a falling building tilt over on it's side (or would it?). I guess anything's possible today with the technology that's available, but this style seems to stretch those boundaries. Another thought, it would be absolutely criminal to wreck a whole bunch of classic 1930's autos like they did here, so once again, the possibilities are unlimited without actually destroying stuff. So that seems like a plus.
Overall, I rather enjoyed the picture. Very colorful with a good rapport for family style entertainment. It had interesting characters and a fair amount of humor, and even a worthy canine companion for the hero. It doesn't make me want to run out and look up the stories that the script was based on, but that's not necessarily a negative. Reading some of the other reviews of the picture I see fans of the writer Herge coming down on both sides, both positive and negative. For once I'm not in that bind, and simply enjoyed the film for the entertainment it offered.