Action-packed for the whole family

Rating: 8/10 (23 October 2011)

For a start I was very pleased to see how respectful Spielberg was with the handling of the original material. After all, this is the man who wanted to turn Harry Potter into an American, combining several books into one (A bad, bad, bad idea Steven!). The story of this film actually combines several of the Tintin books, but as far as taking liberties that's where Spielberg stopped. Everything else is precisely how the Belgian creator, Hergé had imagined it: with that same sense of adventure, mystery, intrigue, action and fun. In other words the same mood and atmosphere that made the comics so successful (at least in Europe) and incidentally, in a way those same elements that were also at the centre of one of Spielberg's classic, Raiders of the lost ark.
Spielberg pays homage to Tintin's creator right from the start by having Hergé himself appearing as a street artist drawing a portrait of Tintin the way we are used to see him in the comics: pure genius!
On the whole I must say that I wasn't as bothered as I thought I was going to be by the motion capture animation. In fact you stop worrying about it about 5 minutes into the film. The characters look more cartoony than realistic and that helps getting away with the fact that their eyes (especially Tintin's) are slightly dead. This is first and foremost still an animated film (I can place a bet right now that it's going to be nominated at the Oscars next year, and probably it's going to win one too!). One thing is for sure: it does look magnificent! From the moody dark shadows reminiscent of those film noir from the 40s, to the great vistas straight out of a David Lean classic, the impeccable cinematography (Spielberg is even credited as Lighting Consultant) is not just beautiful but impressive and atmospheric.
Spielberg in his first animated venture (and his first use of 3D too!) looks like a little boy who's just been told he can do what he wants for his birthday: he appears to be liberated from any restriction he may have had on a normal feature film and seems to have a lot of fun in finding new beautifully inventive ways to transition from one scene to the next in a way you could only do in animation (or with a lot of very expensive CGI): Spielberg's camera floats, glides, flies, moves through glass, shoots straight into mirrors and gives us views which would otherwise been virtually impossible and yet, most of the times it's never showy, it's never forced or indulgent.
It's like watching a master at work who knows exactly where the camera should be at which time. It all culminated with one of the most impressive and perfectly executed chase sequence ever portrayed on screen. Impressive not just because of its pace and its edge-of-your-seat thrills, but also for its meticulously choreographed technique: in fact it takes place in just one impossibly-long shot, which adds to the tension and to the sense of fun. If you ever wondered why didn't they just film the whole thing for real, that sequence alone (which by itself is worth the price of the entire ticket) should serve you as an answer.
I just wished that same tension and fun of that sequence had been present throughout the rest of the film. Don't get me wrong, this first adventures of Tintin is a roller coaster ride like few others. Essentially it's one action set piece after another, and yet somehow I felt there was a strange tendency to resolve problems much too quickly. It's almost as if Spielberg was so preoccupied to get us to the next action sequence that he almost forgot how to makes like the one we were watching. I give you a few examples: a chase sequence at the front of the film, ends much too soon before it has time to climax. Later on there's a scene where Tintin has to steal a key from a bunch of sleeping goons. A lot of time is spent setting up the dangers and then just when the sequence is about to get fun, Tintin gets the key. There's another scene where Tintin faints close to the propellers of a plane and once again he gets saved much too quickly.
The comedy aspect of the film is a bit of a hit and miss: the Inspector Thompson and Thomson are obviously aimed at the younger crowd, but they're also the weakest characters (we had a glimpse of that in the trailer itself, as one of them falls off the stairs: a scene which in the theatre where I was, full of kids, was received with dead silence), on the other hand Captain Haddock is perfect. I don't know whether it's the script, or Andy Serkis's performance or both, but most of the jokes around him seem to work perfectly. Same goes for the little dog Snowy who is in almost every scene of the film, even if just in the background licking a massive bone in the desert. The audience I was with seemed to love him and so did I.
And finally Tintin himself which in this whole 3D world is probably the most two-dimensional character. Aside from the fact that he seems to get a kick out of solving puzzles and getting into adventures, we know very little about him. I'm not really blaming Spielberg for that, this exactly how Tintin was in the comics, but I do wonder if some character development would have been really seen as sacrilegious by the hard-code fans. Certainly not by me.
My full review here http://wp.me/p19wJ2-ro