With The Adventures of
Tintin, Steven Spielberg, one of our greatest and most popular filmmakers
working today, is experimenting with the most modern of filmmaking tools. Consequentially
the film has the creak of an accomplished professional trying to adapt his
style to a new format. Luckily for us the results are a film that is not an
uninteresting exercise but a playful and fluid adventure film that’s as
charming and low-key as it is fun and visually stimulating. Working with
performance-capture techniques for computer animation, Spielberg can send his
camera any which way he wants it to go and send his characters into any
dangerous situation he wants. Luckily, he has some solid material to guide his
way.
Intrepid boy reporter Tintin first appeared in the comics of
Hergé in 1929 and has endured in some areas of the world, mostly Europe and
parts of Asia, as a recognizable and beloved figure. Spielberg’s film has a
script from three of the best and cleverest screenwriters working today, Steven
Moffat, Edgar Wright, and Joe Cornish, that sticks close to the original
conception of the character as a blank goody-two-shoes who happens to be clever
and resourceful in getting out of the scrapes that his curiosity gets him into.
The film starts with Tintin (Jamie Bell) and his faithful dog Snowy buying a
model ship from a street vendor, a simple act that soon grows in consequence.
He doesn’t know it at first. He’s simply perplexed as to why his little impulse
buy is met with such urgency from such mysterious sources.
It turns out that the ship is not a model of just any ship.
No, it’s the Unicorn, a ship that legendarily sunk with hundreds of pounds of
treasure in the cargo hold. It turns out that a wealthy man, the evil Sakharine
(Daniel Craig), will spare no expense to get his hands on the model for hidden
within it lies a clue that will lead to the real thing. There, at the bottom of
the ocean, lie vast piles of treasure. So, it’s a deadly intercontinental race,
then. But first, Tintin is kidnapped and placed aboard a ship mid-mutiny where
he’s forced to help Sakharine find the treasure. He’d rather not, so he flees
with the ship’s embattled drunkard captain, Haddock (Andy Serkis), to beat them
to it.
The set up here is terrific. There’s a nice mystery to solve
and a fun MacGuffin for these characters to fight over. The plot, though I’ve
made it sound so simple, also involves a murdered American, a centuries-old
conflict between warring pirates and their descendants, a pickpocket, two
bumbling bobbies (Nick Frost and Simon Pegg), an opera diva touring a Middle
Eastern country, and circuitous action sequences involving boats, planes, and
automobiles that comes to a head in one great rip-roaring chase of
death-defying destruction through a crumbling and flooding sea-side town.
(There’s more movie after that chase, but it is unquestionable the high point
of the spectacle). It’s the stuff B-movie matinees are made of.
The movie’s essentially a case of this happens and then this
happens and then this happens, a galloping plot that sweeps across several
serialized episodes of adventure and thrills with characters stumbling into
cliffhangers and then solving them with ease. Spielberg digs back into the same
place within himself where he stores the kind of uncomplicated B-movie energy
of something like Raiders of the Lost Ark,
but that film’s warm, propulsive and tactile (not to mention quite possibly the
best action film ever made) while Tintin is
cool, level, and smooth (and not the best action film ever made). It’s a film
with visual play and skillful slapstick choreography animating its computerized
soul but it never feels like real human stakes are in play. The cliffhanger
method of storytelling works like gangbusters but leaves things up in the air.
It doesn’t come to a satisfying conclusion any more than these new renderings
of 2D comics characters ever really feel like fully fleshed movie characters. Still,
though, the film’s comfortable wit, bright colors, and energetic staging make
it more than acceptable entertainment.
Spielberg has made his first animated movie with the verve
of an old master doodling around just for the fun of it. He concocts sequences,
especially that aforementioned chase, that would be logistical nightmares to
direct in live action. His imagery has a range of movement that is at once
freeing and problematic. In some ways, it leaves him rudderless, too tied to
the technology to fully exercise his control over the technique. At times it
feels less a Spielberg film than a Spielberg product. It lacks the power and
humanity of his best efforts.
But then again, I’m really only trying to put my finger on
what it was that kept me ever so slightly from fully embracing a film that’s so
lovely, well-crafted, and entertaining. The fact of the matter is that this is
a fun movie. It’s pleasant and funny
and every so often takes giddy leaps into exciting action. Just as its plot engine
of constant forward movement, always pushing into the next complication and
smashing into the next cliffhanger, creates a series of fun sequences that lack
a satisfying resolution, the film's very distinctiveness – so old fashioned, so
relaxed, so European, and yet so
cutting-edge Hollywood with its CGI and 3D – is both its greatest flaw and
greatest asset.
No comments:
Post a Comment