“You do know what you’re doing, right?”
Tin Tin is a character that’s existed for over eighty years. The stories follow Tin Tin who is a young journalist, and adventurer, as he continually stumbles across mysteries that leads him on grand adventures that eventually has him averting the world from being taken over by some crazy man, or something like that. He’s basically the Belgian version of Scooby-Doo, just being one guy and a dog that doesn’t talk but is a lot more helpful.
This time around Tintin (Jamie Bell) stumbles into the mystery of the Unicorn after deciding to buy a model ship in the market. After closer studies, and being shot at a few times, he discovers a clue that leads him on a journey across the world to try and find out what makes this so important to someone such as Sakharine (Daniel Craig).
Steven Spielberg is a man who’s made his name on the action adventure genre. To list off a few of his more notable forays into aforementioned genre are: Hook, Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. This film plays nicely into his wheelhouse and with the progression of animated filmmaking, blended with the latest motion capture technology, he’s able to remove almost every physical limitation that his imagination has ever had to deal with in filmmaking and create some of the most engaging chase sequences in his career.
While the film as a whole doesn’t reach above a lot of his previous work, and many will say that it can never surpass the greatness of Raiders of the Lost Ark, it does allow for some interesting improvements. Along with the slightly whimsical style of light-hearted story-telling and a couple of head strong characters the film is propelled by the sheer will of this one young man’s desire for answers to his questions. The film does also sport one of the best chase sequences of the year (I refer to the one which involves a hawk and Snowy intermittently).
The one truly disappointing feature of this film has to be the 3D. In the same week where I happened to have my very first IMAX experience, with Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, I also happened to continue to realize how disappointed I’ve become by 3D cinema. While this isn’t a complaint of a filmmaker feeling the need to push characters’ noses at me, it’s more a complaint that at times the depth just isn’t there. It felt like a two-dimensional film for the most part and unnecessarily requiring me to wear these floppy glasses.
PS. Andy Serkis does win for best performance of the film as Captain Haddock, once again proving that he’s best using in motion capture performances, which I can never understand.