Monday, January 14, 2013

The Adventures of Tintin

SPOILER WARNING!!! This post spoils movie The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.

Source material for this movie is quite one-dimensional. In comics Tintin just goes from one situation to another and characters don't have more than one characteristic trade. Tintin comics are also quite dated. I don't know how much todays kids read them. This makes me wonder why Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson and Steven Moffat wanted to do this. Steven Moffat is current main writer and executive producer of Dr Who. He also co-created BBCs Sherlock. Spielberg and Jackson should be better known. If not, Jackson is man behind Braindead and Bad Taste and Spielberg is friend of George Lucas. Both may have made something else too.

Movie is little more than technology demo. It looks really good. But that is only good thing about it. I blame source material for this. I don't know if this was done on purpose or not but movies makes Tintin world  quite dark. Movie is colorful and bright but content have dark aspects. Man is shot at Tintins front door and that doesn't seem to bother anyone because that happens so often. Landlord lady likes Tintin even when she has to witness these shootings and Tintin have to carry his gun when he goes to open the door. Killing and violence doesn't seem to be big deal in this world. It seem to be so casual that you don't even have to think about it.

Alcohol consumption also seem to be no big deal. It is totally ok to drink so much that you get hallucinations. At one point Haddock got sober. That was bad thing because he forgot important things. He and Tintin were losing because of this. When he got more alcohol and went drunken crazy everything was fine again. Nobody said nothing about mess and Tintin and Haddock got important clue. I think this kind of things happen so often that it is normal. There was one scene where drinking almost got them in trouble. But that was almost and drinking saved them in the end. Good lesson for all kids in the audience.

Other thing I have with this movie is that random things happen too conveniently at right time that Tintin can do anything and still survive. This is worst in scene where Tintin and bad guys chase the last piece of paper. In this chase Tintin constantly choose routes that make no sense and would end the chase if something unexpected didn't happen. This problem is in many movies that use CGI in action scenes but this was the worst I have seen. You lose all believability when you go too far.

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