I'll start by being nice: the lighting is some of the greatest I've ever seen in animation, and the detail in skin, hair and fabric is incredible. Motion capture clearly enhances scenes such as the sword fight in the burning ship - but the faces are stuck firmly in the uncanny valley, beautiful in stills but creepy, dead and unsynchronised in motion.
While set pieces such as the chase through the Moroccan city are visually spectacular and technically great fun, making full use of the ability to do it all in one shot and put the camera anywhere, the cartoon violence is often at odds with the realistic visual style. Liberal firing of machine guns, pistols and an early and vicious death contrast with Haddock being span round by his parachute attached to a propeller and having his skeleton silhouetted by a lighting strike in thoroughly slapstick ways. Physics is used conveniently but also subverted - swinging an entire ship across the deck of another, hung by its mainmast? Attempts are made to recreate the simple farce of Thomson and Thompson and the antics of Snowy, but the film just as easily destroys an entire town in a car chase (where the hell did that tank come from?) and gleefully displays a boss fight between two dock cranes - there's no sense of native scale.
The script suffers hugely from telling in addition to showing, almost as if it was written with a radio play in mind. Characters often overstate their goals or what they've just discovered along with the audience, and are ridiculously inconsistent - Haddock proceeds to give Tintin an earnest speech on self-worth and perseverance (at an artificial 'low point' in the story which fails to be low, since I hadn't been made to care about the high) despite having been a complete mess for the past hour, wracked with self-doubt and unfit to give walking directions. Far too much time is spent in the desert , after which the incessant location jumps are rendered pointless by the fact that the goal is uncovered right where the adventure started, simply by bothering to look behind a stack of furniture. This works in the original where the characters never leave the country, but in an adventure blockbuster feels like the kind of hollow storytelling that Steven Moffat occasionally drops in Doctor Who, and I'm astonished it made its way into a movie this big. Forcing three original Tintin stories into one and then papering over the gaps has not worked. Honestly, the best part of the film was the title sequence - brief, stylised and with unlaboured references to many Hergé classics.
Tintin is an example of a franchise that just doesn't work on film. The hand-animated 90s television series just about managed, while the brilliance of the books has been undimmed for 70 years. With this creative team and budget behind such a flat result, can it finally be left alone? Despite the ham-fisted insertion of a cue for a sequel ("Oh look, another clue? Ah well, here we go again! *shrug*"), I hope so.
This review was imported from Letterboxd by IFTTT.
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