Review: "The Adventures of Tintin"

So, as I was mentioning in an earlier blog, I finally saw the movie "The Adventures of Tintin" with my son.

It was an interesting movie, and the theater was relatively crowded, which was reassuring.

The movie starts off with Tintin in an outdoor flea market, where he discovers a ship, "The Unicorn", and then buying it for very little money, only to be offered much more money for it by not one man, but two men. He realized that something is up, and that the ship holds secrets that he does not fully understand yet. So the adventure begins…

He finds out some of the secrets, but finds himself kidnapped, and eventually wakes up to find himself on a ship. Ultimately, he meets the captain of the ship, Haddock, who is his constant companion in the original adventures, after maybe the fourth or fifth book (if memory serves correctly).

So it is that they find themselves having to survive in the open sea with a hostile airplane bearing down on them. They survive being stranded in the Sahara, and they begin a quest for buried treasure. In the meantime, we are introduced to "Marlinspike", which is the ancestral home of the Haddocks, but is in a state of utter disrepair. Yet, Captain Haddock is the rightful heir to this estate, and in the book series, it becomes almost the base of operations for their further adventures.

As suspected, this movie encompassed several of the book adventures and made it all into one giant movie, covering a lot of ground. There were times, admittedly, when I began to wonder if they were not perhaps covering too much ground. It seemed too fast moving at times, too complex – at least for the six year old boy that accompanied me, which was my primary concern.

And yet, there was enough to keep his interest going. Enough adventure, enough sword fighting in particular, and enough chases, to perhaps make it work. I asked him if he enjoyed it, and he responded that he had, and seemed to mean it.

Still, I could not help but wonder if Spielberg had perhaps tried to squeeze too much all at once in the movie. It reminded me at times of Indiana Jones, with the history and exploration not merely taking a backseat to the action, but serving almost as mere backdrop to justify it. Much like Indiana Jones, it had a lot of fighting, desert scenes, searching for priceless treasures after decoding secrets that had endured for ages. Hell, it was even supposed to take place during the same time era.

Yet, it was a good movie, and I enjoyed it. I even believe my son when he says that he enjoyed it, although I am quite sure that he did not get all of the subtleties and nuances thrown in for good measure. There were also little hints for newcomers to Tintin, or perhaps reminders to existing fans, that this was a young man with considerable experience in adventures, when we glimpse the wall in his office, decorated with newspaper headlines showing off all of Tintin's adventures the world over up to that point. Towards the end of the movie, there even seems to be a direct hint that there will be more to follow. It would be appreciated on my end, and I will certainly hope so, but that, we shall see about. It is my understanding that the movie is doing very well overseas, in Europe, where Tintin is much more an established figure already. In the United States, success in sales have been considerably less, evidently. Yet, it is, all in all, a good movie that stands on it's own (and I do understand that my own impressions have been tainted a bit by my own familiarity with the original adventures of Tintin).