• The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Jamie Bell, Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg, Andy Serkis, Cary Elwes, Nick Frost, Tony Curran, Mackenzie Crook
Rating: (PG) 4 stars (out of 5)
It did not improve my tin ear for the language of love and gastronomy and left me with a residual unease about the doings of the intrepid boy journalist. I always felt that I was being taught something by stealth and I did not like it.
As I could only vaguely understand them, I related to the comics visually, and something similar has happened to me with the movie.
Not that The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (Rialto and Hoyts) is in French. It is just that the plotting is a bit plodding, while the motion-capture visuals are so mesmerising that it really does not matter.
I am not a special-effects anorak yet I was perfectly content to marvel at all the little geeky details that normally bore me. The children in the audience laughed in the right places and paid attention during the action sequences but this is a movie for adults, simply because we have some appreciation of just how difficult it must have been to have this thing looking so stupendous.
Best thing: Normally, realistic cartoon humans are creepy. Tintin and the rest of his mates look real but retain enough cartoonish elements not to freak us out.
Worst thing: Tintin is surrounded by comedic idiots but he himself is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, so we have annoying lags as Tintin struggles to keep up with the audience.
See it with: A lover of Herge who is able to get over the fact that Steven Spielberg has dared to make Tintin into a movie that is not just a frame-by-frame recreation of the comics.
- Mark Orton
