Steven Spielberg does justice to Herge's creation with The Adventures of Tintin

Rating: 7/10 (31 December 2011)

When I was a kid during the late '70s, I was familiar with a magazine called "Children's Digest". During that time, the publication had inside its monthly pages a serialized comic that featured a boyish hero named Tintin of which the first I had read was the middle part of "The Secret of the Unicorn". That story would continue the following year as "Red Rackham's Treasure" of which I managed to read all the way through. And so it is about four decades later that having remembered those adventures, I decided to go with my movie theatre-working friend to watch Steven Spielberg's motion capture version of this adaptation of Belgian cartoonist Herge's creation. It had the great sense of humor and entertaining action sequences one would expect from the director of the Indiana Jones spectacles and while the last action set-piece may have been one too many, it wasn't a complete waste of time. And seeing characters like Tintin, his dog Snowy, Captain Haddock, and the comic relief detectives of Thompson and Thomson brought a big smile to my face in the way they were depicted. Also kudos to frequent Spielberg collaborator John Williams for providing another entertaining music score (though it's not as memorable as his classic ones for Jaws, the original '77 Star Wars, E.T., and the aforementioned Raiders, that's for sure). Really, Spielberg's done it again! So on that note, The Adventures of Tintin is highly recommended.