Tintin is not and never was Indiana Jones

Rating: 5/10 (4 March 2012)

"The Adventures of Tintin" starts out strong and quickly loses story, logic and heart in a plethora of over the top action sequences that feel so incredibly close to Indiana Jones that one might start to think Spielberg wanted to make up for the disastrous "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull".
That first half an hour of "Tintin" stays very close to the comic book and that's when the movie is strongest. The CG animation is absolutely gorgeous and the transition of Hergés drawing to the big screen is a success.
But as the movie progresses it gains speed and loses almost everything else. And that's not because Spielberg decided to blend different stories to one adventure. If that's the only thing he'd have done, we'd still be left with plenty of Hergé's brilliant stories and witty dialogue. It's because Spielberg cannot help himself and drowns the movie in big setpiece action sequences which are either ludicrous, or feel like they belong in an Indiana Jones movie. (In one case Spielberg actually uses an action sequence that was scrapped from "Raiders"). John Williams' score does not help at all, because it too borrows heavily from his own compositions for the Indy movies.
Spielberg doesn't stop at that. Haddock's memories of his grandfather and Reckham the Red are presented visually and in full detail. And what Haddock remembers has nothing to do with captains, ships and pirates but instead feels like a copy of the overblown sea battle in the third "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie.
All in all "The Adventures of Tintin" is too loud, fast and grand. It lost the beauty and cleverness of the comics and feels like it was made for an action-hungry ten year old Transformers fan instead of a fan of the comics.