tederick | 7 Dec 2011 | 1,136 Views | 6 Likes | 0 Dislikes

Review: The Adventures of Tintin - The Secret of the Unicorn

There’s a remarkable special feature on the recent Star Wars blu-rays, an animatic for a scene from George Lucas’ Revenge of the Sith, directed by Steven Spielberg. Unchained from any limitation of physical space, or a physical camera, Spielberg runs riot across Lucas’ universe, choreographing a gleefully over-the-top action scene which made me think nothing so much as, “Wowie - the laws of physics have really been holding this guy back.”

The principal pleasure of The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (jeez, guys, learn the secret of a catchy title sometime) is seeing the complete liberation of Spielberg’s visual style. For whatever else you or I may think of the relative merits of his work, we can certainly say that Spielberg knows where to put a camera, and where to place a cut, in order to bring about a kind of well-choreographed vividness and clarity of storytelling. In Tintin, Spielberg is working from the Volume, with no chains on where or how his camera can move. It is invisible enough to stare straight into a mirror, small enough to pass through a pane of bulletproof glass, and lightweight enough to follow Tintin’s stalwart dog, Snowy (certainly my favourite character in the film – and I hate dogs) across endless city blocks. As such, and for the first time in his career, we get a kind of Unexpurgated Master Spielberg, showing us how he’s really been seeing the movies in his head all this time. It’s a treat.

I am no Tintin scholar; like many people, I read a few of the books while learning my French, but that’s all. There’s little in the movie that makes me want to run out and catch up. If Spielberg’s madcap visual vomit is The Adventures of Tintin’s greatest delight, the problem with the picture is Everything Else, most of which (I assume) draws genetically from its source. Boy hero Tintin (how old is he? Where does he work? What does he want out of life?), voiced and mo-capped by an appropriately enthusiastic Jamie Bell, gets press-ganged into a chase across the face of the Earth (a Spielberg specialty), partnering with drunken Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis) against the evil maybe-pirate Red Rackham (a vocally and visually unrecognizeable Daniel Craig).

But the credibility of Rackham’s villainy is never established – i.e. he never does anything badass – just as the fallability of Tintin’s heroism is never established – i.e. he never makes a mistake. (Tintin is an oddity for Spielberg: a completely capable boy, with neither daddy issues nor mommy issues.) Thus, The Adventures of Tintin is one of those movies where we know that the good guys are going to win because they’re the good guys, and the bad guys are going to lose because they’re the bad guys. What an uninspired script from Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright, and Joe Cornish, all of whom are capable of better. Though Tintin is an inquisitive fellow, and Captain Haddock has a bit more at stake than just solving a puzzle, there’s no personal lack on the part of the hero driving The Secret of the Unicorn forward. As such, the film is an amiable piece of digital candy, and successful as such, but hardly enthralling.

The Spielberg Factor is where The Adventures of Tintin gets all of its lift. Spielberg has always been good at pitching visual battle along the X and Y axes; with Tintin he adds Z-space – up and down – to the equation, and the results are delightful. Late in the second act, we are thrown into a flashback of a pirate adventure from centuries ago, and in five or six minutes are treated to a ship-on-ship gun battle that will define the art form for years and years to come. It lays out quite clearly, by exception, what was so missing from my favourite Bad Director whipping-boy of 2011, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Call it a degree of “pirate awesomeness.” In Tintin, cannonballs punch through half-mile waves; thundering sails burst into flame; ship becomes hooked on ship, and the vertical choreography of the battle gets turned promptly on its axis. Captain Haddock and Red Rackham swordfight back and forth on deck, dancing along a line of gunpowder – snuffing it out, lighting it back up – that will eventually lead to the magazine below, and the destruction of the ship. There is overwhelming three-dimensional strategy to the sequence as Spielberg has choreographed it – a “gee whiz, look at this!” propulsion that Rob Marshall wouldn’t understand if it broke a bottle of rum over his head.

The better example, though – the reason you’ll buy Tintin on blu-ray – is the action centerpiece of the back half of the film, the finest action scene Spielberg has assembled since the mine car chase in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Tintin and Haddock have arrived at the exotic port city of Bagghar, which – indeed – seems like it was designed as nothing so much as a giant Mousetrap set, erected for the sole purpose of… well, that would be telling. But suffice to say, Spielberg releases his Mousetrap ball, and the resulting spiral down to the bottom of the basin of the city – a four minute “long take” (there are, of course, no “takes,” only pixels) – as Tintin, Haddock, Snowy, Red Rackham, and an eagle all duke it out for three slips of paper, while all hell breaks loose behind, above, below, and around them – genuinely brought tears of joy to my eyes. By the end of the sequence I was frantically scribbling of Tintin in my notebook – “Too much talking, not enough Bagghar.”

Matt is our new written review guy here at thesubstream, he also co-hosts MAMO and sometimes appears in Watch This Instead. For more on what's out this week, check out Mike's video reviews of Carnage and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Rajo's excellent review of the first 6 minutes of The Dark Knight Rises.

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