The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

At the outset, I'd like to state that, even as someone who's grown up with Tintin, I did not object violently to the considerable liberties that were taken with The Secret of the Unicorn, one of the roughly two dozen books that chronicled the adventures of the young Belgian reporter created by cartoonist Georges Remi, a.k.a. Herge, who has over nearly three quarters of a century become wildly popular in almost every part of the world (except, perhaps, for the United States). I'm not like one of those Lord of the Rings zealots who thinks that Eowyn's long-winded speech upon revealing her true identity to the leader of the Nazgul before fighting him made more narrative sense then choosing to make the big revelation just as she was about to deliver the coup de grace upon him. Sometimes it just makes sense to make changes for the big screen.

I had only recently re-read The Secret of the Unicorn and its sequel Red Rackham's Treasure and had come to the conclusion that as impressive as Herge's signature ligne claire storytelling was, as feature length movies there was little these books had to offer that today's audiences had not seen before in one form or another. I get that there was a need to up the visual ante somehow.

I also get that, since this movie was the first time audiences would be meeting both Tintin and one of his stalwart companions, Captain Archibald Haddock, it was necessary to borrow elements from the book in which Haddock was actually introduced into the series, The Crab With the Golden Claws. I even get why director Steven Spielberg, producer Peter Jackson and their writers felt the need to cut and paste a crucial part of Red Rackham's Treasure onto this movie even as they strongly suggested that the second book of that particular story may yet form the basis of a sequel.

Tintin (Jamie Bell) is a journalist who moonlights as an adventurer. One day, in a flea market he spots a scale model of an old ship, a 17th century man-of-war called the Unicorn and, admiring its craftsmanship, buys it straightaway, only to receive two offers from strangers wanting to buy the model ship in rapid succession, the first such offer being made by a nervous-looking man who, upon being rebuffed, tells him the ship will bring him nothing but trouble, and the second, much more generous offer being from an affluent collector named Sakharine (Daniel Craig) who doesn't seem to want to take no for an answer. Tintin refuses him as well and takes the ship home. Unfortunately, an accident involving Tintin's dog, Snowy and a cat that wanders into his apartment results in the ship being broken and a small cylinder slipping under the furniture unnoticed. What Tintin doesn't know but will soon find out is that the contents of that cylinder will lead him on a globe spanning adventure involving mortal peril, the likes of which he will only be able to face with his faithful Snowy and his newfound friend, Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), whose knowledge is key to unlocking the mysterious secret of the Unicorn.

From a narrative perspective, the film works. It's got a solid plot, brisk pacing, good character development and dialogue which retains by and large the spirit of the comic books (or at least the English translations that I grew up with, anyway). Full credit goes to the writers for even trying to situate the adventure properly in the Tintin chronology by making brief reference to Tintin's past exploits through news clippings on the walls. It's not quite the Tintin I grew up with, but to be honest, I don't think a movie geared for today's audiences could have been.

Oddly enough, my problems with the movie stem more from the visualization of Tintin and his world than anything else.

When Steven Spielberg said that motion capture technology represented the best way to bring Tintin's adventures to the big screen, I was skeptical. While I was more than ready to concede that Herge's unique aesthetic was not quite possible with a traditional live-action setup, I wasn't sure why Spielberg believed that mo-cap would be superior to key-frame CG animation; surely the folks at Pixar or Spielberg's own Dreamworks animation, with their technical prowess, were up to the task.

Admittedly, much of the action in Tintin went a considerable way towards convincing me that Spielberg was right, but not quite all the way. The camera movement is simply amazing, with Spielberg's signature flair for following the action with a single shot for several seconds on end where most directors would have cut at least half a dozen times if not more. The actions scenes on the ship at sea and in the streets of what I presume is London, as well as the madcap chase sequence in Morocco stood out for me in particular. Such techniques still remain beyond even Pixar's and Dreamworks' considerable capability.

Where the film falls short, though is in the quieter, character-oriented moments. Several characters in this film, and I am loath to say this because I really hoped that this movie would avoid this, suffer from the dreaded "dead-eye" syndrome that has plagued just about every purely mo-cap film to date. The most conspicuous of all is Tintin himself, and what pains me about this shortcoming is how, in many, many instances, the decision for his eyes or eyebrows not to move or distort or indicate any kind of emotion, even while actor Jamie Bell is trying his darnedest to convey that Tintin is excited or upset or anything else, strongly suggests that Spielberg's interpretation of Tintin is that he is largely expressionless. Anyone who has read even half of Tintin's adventures can attest that even though Tintin's face is little more than very simple lines and a pair of dots for his eyes, Herge was able to draw a fairly wide range of expression from that combination. Tintin's been happy, angry, sad, shocked, intent and a whole lot of other emotions, very few of which are conveyed by his digital avatar.

Not only that, but some characters simply don't translate very well at all, like opera singer Bianca Castafiore, magnate Omar Ben Salaad and a number of her audience members who were clearly rendered in "Herge-esque" fashion but all of whom ended up just looking kind of strange. In particular, Salaad looks like he stepped out of Robert Zemeckis' The Polar Express.

The good news on the character front, though, is that veteran performance-capture actor Andy Serkis, who brought J.R.R. Tolkien's Gollum to life in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies and who made two cinematic simians even more lifelike than the Hollywood actors they played against in King Kong and Rise of the Planet of the Apes makes Captain Haddock seem as lively as Tintin seems inert. There is a consistency to this; Haddock was, in the comics, always the more boisterous of the two characters, and it is a delight not only that Serkis was chosen to bring this character to life but that screenwriters Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish have reproduced much of his signature colorful language ("Blistering Barnacles! Thundering Typhoons!") for his dialogue. Serkis, along with Spielberg's eye for action, makes a thundering argument for the use of motion capture, one that is not easily dismissed.

Still, I couldn't help but feel that this film could have been a lot more than it was if Spielberg and his crew had done a few things a little bit differently. Still, I suppose budgetary constraints may have prevented them from being too daring. One definite disappointment I have to voice, however, was with legendary composer John Williams' music which, unthinkable as this may sound, actually sounded generic. The 3-D in this film, while it still did not provide as amazing an experience as the 3-D presentation of James Cameron's Avatar did, was put to good use here, and in just the right scenes.

All told, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn hits a lot of the right notes for me, and personally I think Spielberg and Peter Jackson, who's slated to direct the next installment, deserve another crack at this, although I qualify this with the statement that there is still plenty of room for improvement.

Rating: 3.5/5