The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn

The use of motion capture technique in Spielberg’s Tintin actually makes it curiously devoid of the depth, animation and energy of the comics.

Updated on: 7 February 2024 5:37 pm

Starring: Andy Serkis, Jamie Bell, Cary Elwes, Daniel Craig, Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, Toby Jones
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Rating:

The Adventures of Tintin starts off marvellously with an opening title sequence so elegant and captivating that it makes you totally overlook the cast and crew details streaming alongside. Much of it has to do with the fact that the titles use the original sketches from the books. Elsewhere in the magazine, Devangshu Datta talks about the exquisite details in those fine lines. To me, the details have made the books vibrant and dynamic, each drawing leading on to the next with a unique sense of movement, the illustrations dancing in front of my eyes like a film reel unspooling on the big screen. For that purist in me, the use of motion capture technique in Spielberg’s Tintin actually makes it curiously devoid of the depth, animation and energy of the comics.

Much of the story at the start has one hooked. Besides our reporter hero and his eccentric dog Snowy, the chase for a buried treasure boasts of a pickpocket, a replica of a ship, the clue to a treasure in its mast, an Interpol agent shot at the reporter’s doorstep and the bumbling Thomson and Thompson messing it up at each step. These early scenes make up the best there is to the film and to the comics: light-hearted humour and gripping story-telling that makes you ask one thing: what’s coming up next?

But that charm wears off a while later and things cease to absorb. As we move with a kidnapped Tintin to a hostage ship and then sail with him to Bagghar in Morocco, the film gets way too crammed with breathless action and stunts. The climax becomes almost a slapstick routine. There are some nice set-pieces. Like when Tintin, Haddock and Snowy steal keys from the sleeping sailors even as the ship heaves on the choppy sea. Or when the Milanese Nightingale shatters glass with her high-pitched voice. Serkis’s boozing Haddock stands out when hallucinating in the desert. Snowy is delightfully kookie, when he is chasing a pickpocket, taming a dog doubly huge and fighting with a mouse over a sandwich. Unfortunately, the hero turns out the most colourless and lacklustre of the cast. Not the Tintin I knew.

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