Big Picture Big Sound

Pushing Tintin

"The Adventures of Tintin" is the story of a young-ish boy who lives alone, owns a gun, mistreats his dog, and hangs out with an alcoholic sailor. Told lazily by Steven Spielberg, the story unfolds in ADHD bursts of dramaless peril and a total lack of character development.

To someone not familiar with the (beloved, I'm repeatedly told) comics by Hergé, at no point are you given a reason for why you should care about this kid, other than the fact that scary adults don't like him. He stumbles from plot point to plot point, never more than a few seconds away from simple resolution, and another pseudo-conflict. The plots from three Hergé comics were squeezed into the movie, and it's readily apparent.

That's how the movie runs: a problem, then no more than 60 seconds go by before an effortless solution. After an hour, it's so blatantly obvious that the characters are never in any real danger, the movie ceases to be a movie. It devolves to animated characters running through scenery; merely a spectacle to look at and to oogle the pretty graphics.

In that way, "Tintin" partially succeeds. As with most animated movies, this one is gorgeous. Motion capture adds a realistic fluidity to the character's motion. Thankfully there are limited close ups, as the faces look a little off tempo to the spoken words. John Williams still knows how to make a cinematic and exciting score, even if it seems completely lifted borrowed from his work on the "Indiana Jones" series.

Perhaps that was my biggest problem with "Tintin". It's that I had seen it before, done better - and by Spielberg himself. The motorcycle chase scene, sure to be all the rage as a demo clip, seems lifted from the storyboards of the same scene from "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade": Old-school motorcycle, with sidecar, chased by baddies, plucky comic relief sidekick jostling along. Instead of a flagpole you get an RPG and instead of Germans you get pirates.

To dismiss critiques of this movie by saying "it's just for kids" is to absolve mediocre filmmaking and assume that kids are stupid. Will they enjoy this movie? Sure, probably, as much as cats like following a laser pointer. But to invoke the love for a movie, you need to create memorable characters that you care about. Something that Spielberg, formally a master of it, seems to have forgotten. Pixar makes "kids movies" that adults love too, for this very reason. "Wall-E" has more character, story, and drama in the first ten minutes than Tintin does in its entire vacuous two hours.

I'm sure "Tintin" will make tons of money, and be forgotten completely until the inevitable sequel. There's just no reason to love this movie, something that's offensive I'm sure to those who loved the comics. It's not that "Tintin" is a bad movie. It's worse: it's boring.