US Edition Cert: PG, 106 min. Dir: Steven Spielberg; Starring: Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost
It’s testament to either the genius of Hergé or the limitations of computer graphics – or more probably both – that two dots of ink from a Belgian cartoonist’s pen can express more wit and artistry than £82 million of the best 3D special effects Hollywood can conjure.
The difference, you see, is in the eyes. And in this first of three planned Tintin films by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, the eyes do not have it – ‘it’ being that vital, twinkling difference that separates a character worth caring about from a dummy in a Debenhams’ shop window.
The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn (actually a mishmash of Unicorn and The Crab With The Golden Claws, with dashes of Red Rackham’s Treasure and other Hergé works thrown in) is a perfectly decent animated adventure, comparable to the better output of DreamWorks if perhaps not Pixar.
Using The Secret Of The Unicorn’s hunt for three scrolls as its starting point, the film hares from the cobbled streets of ... well, wherever it is Tintin lives, to the fictional Moroccan port of Bagghar and back, via the high seas and the Sahara desert, without ever pausing for breath. Hot on the tail of the young reporter and his faithful (and very well-animated) dog Snowy, is Sakharine (Daniel Craig), whose role has been expanded here from model ship-collecting oddball to ruthless international crook.
While Tintin’s breakneck pace is totally at odds with the spellbinding logic of Hergé’s books and the irresistible bounce and flow of Spielberg’s own Indiana Jones movies, it often works in the film’s favour. A terrific motorbike chase through a Moroccan marketplace, presented in one impossible, continuous take, should impress the stuffiest 3D refuseniks and capture even the shortest attention spans. Likewise, an hallucinatory sequence that brings galleons crashing through the moonlit Saharan dunes is pure blockbusting spectacle.
But there’s a mechanistic quality to Spielberg’s craft that’s undoubtedly disappointing: a film directed by one such distinctive artist and based on the work of another shouldn’t feel like it could have been made by almost anyone.
The main personality-stifler is the film’s use of performance capture; the method by which the cast’s movements and expressions have been translated into computer-generated visuals. However much more successful the technique is here than it has been elsewhere, crucially it’s not successful enough: even if Jamie Bell wasn’t so monotonously earnest as Tintin, he’d still look about as conscious as a bollard with a quiff.
Simon Pegg and Nick Frost also disappoint as the inept sleuths Thomson and Thompson, but through no fault of their own: the soupy physicality of the CG world and Spielberg’s restive camerawork saps their slapstick of rhythm and impact. Only Andy Serkis, a performance capture veteran, convincingly breathes life into his character’s pixels, delivering a full-blooded and frequently hilarious turn as Tintin’s sozzled ally Captain Haddock.
The script, co-written by Doctor Who writer Steven Moffat and British filmmakers Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, is well-intentioned but misjudged, occasionally falling back on facile screenwriter-ese (“The bad news is we’ve only got one bullet!” “What’s the good news?” “We’ve got one bullet!”) and some very English here’s-one-for-the-dads innuendo. Both sit uneasily with the wry humanism and neat satire of the books: this is less an adaptation of Hergé’s writing than a kind of airless pastiche of it.
On its own terms, The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn is a success, although it’s debatable whether these are the terms on which every audience member will approach it. As a family-friendly adventure romp it ticks every box, but the unique appeal of the Tintin books does not lie in seeing boxes being ticked.
Famously, Spielberg only discovered Hergé’s work when a French critic called the first Indiana Jones film, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, an obvious homage to it. Even more famously, Hergé later said that Spielberg was the only director capable of successfully bringing it to the big screen. That probably remains true. But this film hasn’t done it.
The Adventures of Tintin 3D: Seven Magazine review, by Mike McCahill
Seven rating: *
As a youngster, one turns to Tintin to deduce something of the world and one’s own place within it. As many a Hergé scholar has noted, the blankness of the hero’s features makes these books ideal for projecting onto. By deploying motion-capture animation to bring The Adventures of Tintin to the screen, however, Steven Spielberg has replaced blankness with specifics: this Tintin has Jamie Bell’s fizzog, Photoshopped into a waxy charmlessness. And don’t ask about Spielberg’s hatchet-faced Snowy: I’m still grieving.
The storytelling feels scarcely less inorganic, having constantly to interrupt itself so the film-makers can justify the 3D surcharge. The attempt to create and inhabit a world is secondary to the need to yank us through it – down stairs, along ropelines, across pirate ships meant to evoke memories of other mega-franchises.
The pleasure of scanning words and images at leisure has been replaced by Xbox-ready design and the fast pace of the modern multiplex: everything here is impermanent. Even the denouement, with all the arrogance of bigshots, assumes sequels.
Yet as in the last Indiana Jones film, there’s a sense Spielberg is tapping our cultural memories without offering anything that might replenish them. In the ongoing conversation between this director and his audience, Tintin holds all the substance of a text message with an optimistic smiley face at the end of it.
That technical expertise can be admired, if you like your films to arrive with the smell of formaldehyde and silica, and there are lovely 2D opening credits, but the positives end there. The books – hard-covered and enduring – stopped time; the film – a relentless torrent of binary code – merely washes it down the plughole.