The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn – film review

I wasn’t sure if I needed to be curious or concerned about whether Steven Spielberg’s visual style would successfully translate to an animated feature or whether The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn would turn out to be a flat but pretty looking trailer for a video game. How relieved I was, then, to have it confirmed that Spielberg’s prowess as a director is not only in his placement of the camera and the framing therein, but also in the manipulation of the three-dimensional (and I don’t mean in terms of 3D filmmaking) world before it. He treats his set, be it real or virtual, like a theatre stage and utilises the space he’s been given to maximum effect. To his credit, Spielberg has not let The Secret Of The Unicorn slip away from him into the hands of digital artists; his puppet master’s strings are pulling on every movement and detail throughout, never allowing you to forget who’s show this is.

When I sat down to watch Tintin after a long and tiring day of fruitless travelling I’d planned only to watch the first five minutes to give my excited little mind a taste of what I’d anxiously been waiting months and months for. About forty five minutes later I was still watching, unable to tear myself away from the stream-of-consciousness, runaway train of a storyline that hardly stops for a breath. The narrative mimics the ever calculating and deducing mind of it’s titular character, who’s always trying to find something positive and constructive in the moment, even when a trail goes dead. Tintin, who sometimes seems to be suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder or a condition somewhere along the autism spectrum, needs to report on something, even if he only completes half the adventure; but often that acceptance of “failure” opens up his mind, and the film’s story, to new ideas and possibilities.

In some ways I was startled by the greediness of the plot to utilise every action-adventure mechanism it could without holding back with a profiteering eye for sequels and spin-offs. It guzzles joyous clichés like a big, erm, cliché guzzling machine. But within the non-stop spinning cogs of the plot is a balleticism and poetry to the way each set-piece hands the baton over to the next. It’s not bloated and cold, it’s just eager and full of energy like a young boy playing with his collection of action figures.

The skill apparent in Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish’s screenplay is it’s tendency to allow time for character’s (and our feelings for them) to develop amidst the chaos; in fact they write the intimate scenes as if they too were action scenes. We learn about our protagonists’ back stories and lives whilst they’re dangling from boats and biplanes and cranes. It’s all in there, you just don’t notice it half the time until you’re cheering characters on and rooting for them to escape danger.

Elsewhere the strong vocal talents are an essential weapon in the film’s arsenal, although you can hardly recognise Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as the bickering Thompson twins, but I think there’s been a little tweaking going on in the studio to line the two very different sounding actors up. Daniel Craig flexes his vocal range as the dastardly villain and shows us he can do more than just play sombre, monotone secret agents. But at the core of the film is the charmingly destructive trapeze act of a relationship that’s shared between Tintin and Captain Haddock, played by Jamie Bell and Andy Serkis respectively, both of whom turn potentially one-dimension characters into many-faceted eccentrics; both aiding and antagonising the other as external forces constantly threaten to defeat them both.

Amazingly the film manages to make an important point about using or abusing alcohol to forget painful memories or to escape reality; in fact one scene in particular, a confrontation between Tintin and the alcohol dependant Haddock, reminded me of an exchange between me and my father a few years ago when I wasn’t coping with life very well. Yet somehow the tone of this underlining emotional message isn’t preachy or self-righteous (Haddock is endearingly back on the booze by the end once he’s stopped downing it for the wrong reasons), it simply implies that fun, adventure and the answers to a difficult riddle can emerge even when you’re completely sober.

Beyond the serious subtext that intermittently crops up, I found it a good sign that I exclaimed “WOW!!” more than once whilst watching the film. In a period where we’ve seen almost everything that cinema has to offer, Spielberg manages to take a format he himself has perfected in the past (particularly with Indiana Jones) and dazzles us with the novelty of his film’s unrelenting pace, helped greatly by the gravity defying “cartoon logic” that frees up the spirit of the action. And yet beyond the central goings-on there’s always something tinkering away on the periphery; whether it’s a slapstick aside or a layer of background crowd detail, you’ll find the mind-bogglingly complex vistas too much to take in and appreciate on just one viewing, so make sure you have a return visit.

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn has the naïve, impatient and tempestuous drive of a child experiencing the world for the first time, and yet it’s harnessed with the experience and love for the motion of pictures that Spielberg has only gotten better at demonstrating over the years. The treasure for us isn’t the secret of the Unicorn, but that the film exists in the first place and the fact that Spielberg remains one of the few director’s of his generation still with the desire and ability to quench our thirst for cinematic spectacle, be it large or small.

5/5