A bit too much of everything

Rating: Null/10 (31 October 2011)

I went to see the movie the first weekend it was released here in Belgium with some big expectations due to the role the movie had here in the Belgian media before its release.
I heard the intro was "stunning & creative" etc. but this was the first deception. It was a simple 2D animated composition with the covers of the Tintin albums where you see the cast, nothing special.
But from the moment the first frame started I was simply blown away by it's CG. It's really like you are thinking "is this 3D or real ?". With only the exception of the faces of the characters everything looked real to me. The first scene is "shot" in Brussels on the "Place du Jeu de balle" from the Marolles district where there is a daily famous flea market. That same flea market is shown in the shot, where a caricaturist (who is clearly Hergé) is doing a drawing for a customer who sits in front of him. When the drawing is finish he gives it to that customer with the words "There you go, I think it's quite resembling..." on that sketch is the (famous) Tintin portrait in 2D, you then understand that that customer is Tintin. This was for me a nice & original allusion to Hergé in the movie.
The storyline is a mix of "The Secret Of The Unicorn" together with "The Crab With The Golden Claws" with a few changes. The sheikh in the movie is a "good" guy and not a drug baron (although it's not 100% clear if he's not) like in the album and Bianca Castafiore appears in the movie too. The part in Baghar (a fictive port city in Morocco) is also different than in the album. They escape from the sheikhs house and are pursued by his guard and by Sakharin (the bad guy in the movie) and his men. This scene is really too much exaggerated for me and is not what would happen in a Tintin album could happen. It gave me more the impression that I was in a scene from Uncharted 2 (a video game) with that bike and collapsing buildings than in a Tintin movie.
The movie ends like in the Secret of the Unicorn album too and has an open end (like in the album) into the direction of the album "Red Rackham's Treasure".
That's "in short" what the movie is about story wise, the scenario is rather well written and the mix of both stories is also nicely done, the extra elements are believable and possible and gives an extra dimension to the story. During the movie I also saw a few camera angles that were typically "comic book-ish" like it was directly from a still of the album. But what really irritate me in the movie was all the "special camera moves" in the movie, like the hundred "pass through" elements and so on. The movie was also quite short in comparison with other movies.
In short, it's really a "sick" movie for CG and the story is interesting but "tribute-wise" it's a bit too "Americanized" (with "action-action-action" most the time) and some jokes are more "Looney Tunes"-ish (like the belch of Haddock in the airplane tank), and that's clearly not what Hergé's work is about.
I think I might go check the next (if there will be some) movies only for the CG and to see the mixes of different stories but I think at the end I will be a bit disappointed too.