The first screenings of Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson‘s highly anticipated blockbuster The Adventures of Tintin kicked off this past weekend in UK and the word is mostly positive. Most outlets praised the level of entertainment Spielberg and co. have delivered, with some qualms over the animation style and story.
Timing with release, Hitfix has a new poster which shows our lead character and his trustworthy dog Snowy. Check it out below followed by a round-up of the critical response for the film starring Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Daniel Craig, Cary Elwes, Toby Jones, Mackenzie Crook and Daniel Mays. While us Americans have to wait over two months, UK’ers get to see the adventure starting October 26th. Click each outlet for the full review.
It’s precisely the old-school exploits of the Jones films that the director and screenwriters Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World) and Joe Cornish (Attack the Block) have channeled here, transforming two of the 23 Tintin comics into a saga filled with captivating CGI action and clever sight gags, while maintaining a compact narrative that never takes itself too seriously. Such additions should help the film receive a warm welcoming across the Atlantic, although the franchise’s overseas renown more or less guarantees that international grosses will exceed domestic ones.
After an animated credit sequence with nods to both Saul Bass and Spielberg’s own Catch Me If You Can, we first meet Tintin (Jamie Bell) while he’s getting his portrait sketched by a Herge look-alike in an outdoor flea market. The drawing produced is the type of pared-down, thick-line illustration (a style known as the ligne claire) which was the artist’s trademark, and its contrast with the complex visual universe created by Jackson’s Weta Digital fx house shows how far animation techniques have come since the last century, although The Adventures of Tintin still manages to capture the winsome spirit of the original.
…aside from a crack about a shepherd said to have shown too much enthusiasm for animal husbandry, the humor throughout is resolutely PG-friendly, lacking in the knowing irony and snarky, anachronistic wisecracks that have become such predictable fixtures of other recent blockbusters and reboots. Spielberg largely honors the innocent, gung-ho tone of the original stories, with their air of boyish derring-do (femme characters barely feature at all here), sensibly shunning the racist and anti-Semitic elements that just won’t wash with contempo auds. Result is retro without being stodgy or antiquated; Tintin himself, for instance, has a more mischievous glint in his eye than the wide-eyed naif of the strips, which makes him feel more modern, if curiously unplaceable in terms of age.
The worst that could be said of “The Secret of the Unicorn” is that the action is so relentless, it nearly comes to feel like a videogame as it leaps from one challenge to the next. Younger auds will embrace it more than older ones, although even teens may feel it lacks the kitsch majesty that made “Avatar” such a hit.
In Contention (B):
You’d have been forgiven for thinking that Steven Spielberg had lost his fun gene after he last gifted our cinema screens, a distant-seeming three years ago, with the dismal “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”: a soulless, haphazardly crafted piece of directorial brand-whoring, in which Harrison Ford’s eyes appeared deader than those of any mo-cap mannequin.
Tardily reviving a beloved franchise that seemed to have reached generational closure in its third instalment was always a dubious move — but it acquires full-blown redundancy with the arrival of “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn,” a springy, souped-up entertainment whose ample boy’s-own pleasures hew far closer to the original Indiana Jones template than that dim 2008 sequel.
Empire (4 out of 5 stars):
From the Nouvelle Vague flourish of the opening credits, featuring Tintin in silhouette dashing past giant typewriters and former foes, recalling the Saul Bass-themed curtain raiser of Catch Me If You Can, set off by John Williams’ fleet-fingered piano score, the mood is set. Here is a joyful play of opposites: the romance of old-school cinema, conjured by the slick synthesis of CG wizardry.
Vitally, as near as can be, here too is the ardent, moules-frites aroma of Hergé’s rainbow-lovely world of high adventure and colloquial antics. Spielberg’s first venture into animation (we’ll stick with that) expands the Belgian’s formal elegance into a wonderland of digital detail without ever losing sight of the bubbly charm of the books. Encompassing the shovel chins and bobbled noses of the Hergéian caricatures, Weta pursues a whimsical variation on photoreal. But it’s not just about the flour-fine textures of sand or gunpowder, the flicker of firelight across a blade or a breeze ruffling Tintin’s unbendable forelock. This is also an expansion of the Spielbergian dream (with a tincture of Jackson’s boldness). Like a boy set free from the schoolroom of reality, he lets fly.
The Telegraph (3 out of 5 stars):
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.
The Guardian (2 out of 5 stars):
When the Belgian animator Hergé died in 1983, he left behind one last, unfinished Tintin adventure. Entitled Tintin and Alph-Art, the story hinged on an evil scheme to abduct Tintin and encase him in liquid polyester. The gallant boy reporter would therefore become a “living sculpture”, beautiful but dead. “Your corpse will be displayed in a museum,” the villain (according to Hergé’s notes) would cackle. “And no one will suspect that the work constitutes the last resting place of Tintin.”
Three decades on, this dastardly plot may just have been completed. Out of the blocks comes The Adventures of Tintin, a rip-snorting Indiana Jones-style romp from director Steven Spielberg, darting from the cobbled streets of Paris to the bazaars and hill towns of north Africa in search of buried treasure. On the face of it, all is well. But look closely at the film’s protagonists, with their strange vestigial features and blank, marbled gaze, and one comes to suspect that here, at last, is the version of Alph-Art we assumed would never see the light of day.
Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s inaugural instalment in their planned Tintin trilogy delivers the frolicking, boy’s-own-adventure goods in delightful, delirious spades. From frequently breathtaking animated imagery to superb vocal outings by its British cast and a tight screenplay (by Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish) that retains the globetrotting charm of Belgian originator Herge’s comic-book series, the movie keeps a could-be-confusing plot humming along nicely while adding in dollops of wry, affectionate humour. Tintin is a fine example of what can be achieved when some of cinema’s brightest minds come together to honour great source material.
Obsessed With Film (4 out of 5 stars):
It appears that, following his hugely underwhelming revisit of the Indiana Jones franchise, Steven Spielberg is keen to remind us that he hasn’t lost his firm grip on robust Hollywood filmmaking. With two features set for release within the next three months – the other being his much-anticipated War Horse adaptation – it’s relieving to report that the first, The Adventures of Tintin, sees the director back on strong form. Working from three of author Hergé’s Tintin stories, “The Crab with the Golden Claws”, “The Secret of the Unicorn” and “Red Rackham’s Treasure”, Spielberg has delivered a ludicrously entertaining adventure film which will entertain both fans of the source material as well as the uninitiated, no matter their age.
Digital Spy (4 out of 5 stars):
With its dizzying spectacle and fast-paced action, The Adventures of Tintin is top notch entertainment and miles ahead of its performance capture predecessors in its wit and visual sophistication. Expect audiences to lap this up when it makes its cinema debut later this month.
Total Film (3 out of 5 stars):
Before he died in 1983, Tintin creator Hergé pegged Steven Spielberg as the director worthiest of adapting his work. You can see how the Belgian writer/artist would’ve pictured it: the cliffhanging kicks of Indiana Jones sweetened with the winsome wonder of Close Encounters/E.T. He probably didn’t hope for a replay of 1941’s knockabout chaos. No, Spielberg’s latest isn’t down there with his biggest bomb. But there are times when its manic ghost haunts his animated epic. Hergé’s original comic books tend to alternate wodges of exposition with fits of action. Spielberg’s version heavily favours the latter, which sounds promising in theory – who needs another blockbuster that’s two-thirds characters explaining stuff to one another? – but in practice means a movie that doesn’t quite know when to ease off the pedal.
The Adventures of Tintin will open on December 21st in the US.