The Adventures of Tintin – the Secret of the Unicorn (2011)
I should probably tell you straight away that I have been waiting for this film for about 3 decades! Yes I know, quite a bold statement which may give away my age, but it will also tell you about my level of expectations for this film. If then you add the fact that I’ve grown up watching Spielberg movies back in his golden years (obviously I’m talking about the 80s) and that I’ve also been an avid fan of all Tintin comics ever since I was a little boy, you can probably get an idea of the kind of palpitations I had when I sat into the theatre and wore my 3D glasses. Having said all that I will still try to give an unbiased and honest review as much I possibly can, praising the (many) merits of the film but also highlighting some of the faults which in my option prevented ‘The Adventures of Tintin’ from being the masterpiece I really wanted it to be.
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 does actually combine several of the Tintin books: ‘The Crab with the Golden Claws’ (in which Tintin befriends Haddock and saves him from smugglers) and the two-parter ‘The Secret of the Unicorn’ and ‘Red Rackham’s Treasure’ (which is the core of the film, so all the bits about the search for the lost treasure). There are also some very small elements and secondary characters from other stories too, 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, the same elements also at the centre of one of Spielberg’s classic, Raiders of the lost ark. It’s not surprising that Hergé himself, after seeing that film back in 1981 thought Spielberg was the only person who could ever do Tintin justice.
Spielberg pays homage to Tintin’s creator right from the start, not just in the beautifully design title sequence (reminiscent of the one from ‘Catch Me If You Can’), where he show us so many elements from all Tintin stories, not just in the colour palette he chooses for the cinematography of the film or in the way each characters’ faces look, but he even goes as far as 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 (Though bizarrely it was snubbed at the Oscars in 2012). Yes, probably they should have though about going for proper animation, ditching the motion capture, but then it would have lost something from the pure visual point of view. Becaus 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 (which Spielberg love so much) and the impeccable cinematography (Spielberg himself is even credited as Lighting Consultant) which is not just beautiful but impressive and atmospheric too.
Spielberg as a director, 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 practically 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 meticulous choreography: in fact it takes place in just one impossibly-long shot, which adds to the tension and to the sense of fun. Watching it again with my son, he was on the edge of the seat watching this… and so was I. If you ever wondered why didn’t they just film the whole thing for real, this sequence alone (which by itself is worth the price of the entire ticket) should give you the answer.
I just wished that same tension and sense of fun on 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 us 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.
Whatever happened to those classic Spielberg long action sequences that were so tense despite being so simple? I’m thinking of Indy trying to get the antidote to the poison he’s just drunk as the little bottle gets kicked around a room full of screaming people in the Temple of Doom, or fight sequence by the plane in Raiders (and the truck chase in the same film), or even the glass breaking sequence in the otherwise weak Lost World? (In fact they are too many to even mention).
The pace of ‘Tintin’ is strange and a bit uneven too. It has moments of long exposition (this is a fault that comes with the source material to be completely fair, but I must say the script doesn’t really help) and I found the story is needlessly convoluted for the type of thing it was and a lot of the plot point were spoken out more than shown. And then in between those more ploy bits, a whole lots of little short action scenes (as I said, slightly too short to feel important). I would have rather had fewer set pieces but longer in their execution. Ands then at time they even felt somehow anticlimactic (I’m thinking of the last 10 minutes of the film for example: the ending did feel very much like a letdown).
I am probably picking needles here mainly because, as I said before, I love these stories (and the story-teller) way too much and I really wanted this to be perfect.
The comedy aspect of the film is a bit of a hit and miss too: 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) but steals the show almost every time.
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, or it actually would have helped a bit.
Finally I feel I should say a few words about John Williams score, the first one in years. There’s a very quirky and weird jazzy title music (which never really seem to play out throughout the rest of the film) which is the most un-Wiliamesque theme in a while. It certainly was not bad, but it feels slightly detached from the rest of the film. The Star Wars title music was never repeated throughout the movies either, and yet it felt part of the score. This title music here felt like it belonged to can other film (in fact it felt like a recycled cue from “catch me if you can”). It’s hard to review the score, because for most of the film I felt it never really had the time to breathe as much as it should have. The comic cues suffered more than others (the ones for the Inspectors for example), as they were covered by the dialogue and the rest of the sound effects to the point where I even wondered whether any music was needed at all (probably they felt they did need it, to help make it slightly funnier).
Funny how, on one hand there was definitely way too much music in the film (in fact there was hardly a moment without) and yet on the other it had very little time to shine. Having said that, I was still able to hum some of the Tintin action tunes after watching it… and that’s always a good sign.
To recap, this is a solid action-packed fun-ride for the whole family which is not as loud, dumb and insulting as some of those Pirates of the Caribbean films were. It’s proper film-making, even if in animation form, with its heart in the right place, arching back to the original source and to the Indiana Jones-like adventure we all love so much.
4/5
Check out my other reviews of movies by Spielberg: Raiders of the lost art, ET The Extra-Terrestrial, War Horse
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