Religious (dis)order

According to the narrator of Christopher Smith’s latest genre derivative Black Death, the plague is estimated to have wiped out around 50% of the European population. When people around you are dying off at an alarming rate and you can in all reasonability be next, you want answers: why is this happening? In Medieval England – the year of our Lord 1348, to be precise – the young monk Osmund (Eddie Redmayne), questioning whether the plague is possibly some sort of punishment for their sins (“but for what sin?”), volunteers to lead a group of the bishop’s knights to a remote village “across the marshes”. 

Apparently, this particular village is unaffected by the plague. Instead of instilling some gratitude that at least someone somewhere is free from the disease, it elicits suspicion: why that village in particular? What do they do or have that keeps them safe from the plague? According to the leader of the knights, Ulric (Sean Bean), a necromancer is the reason for the village's proliferation. And within Christianised Britain, necromancy and any other pagan activity and witchery will result in death to those who transgress against God.

So off go the monk and the knights – including the film’s best secondary character, the serious minded older knight Wolfstan (John Lynch) - to fight what they believe is the good fight. As everyone who’s ever seen a medieval epic or adventure knows, battles, dismemberment and death await on their quest. We know that the knights’ numbers will dwindle, and that much will be sacrificed on their way to the mysterious village.

But while Black Death hooks you with its premise and the promise of swords clashing and heads rolling, at a certain point the film becomes a surprisingly sombre tale of faith, religious indoctrination and the evils that men do in the name of their deity. It’s not as weighty or innovative as Valhalla Rising, as it still maintains certain genre conventions. Yet Black Death’s final half hour opens up interpretations on how certain events actually proceeded for the characters and the audience, which contributes to the film’s overall scepticism in the belief in the supernatural. In this sense, it’s less an epic than many other medieval actioners, and also more.

Christopher Smith is an exciting minor filmmaker, ‘minor’ in the sense that he hasn’t yet broken out into mainstream cinema even though his movies are all genre films. As Black Death is ostensibly a period adventure, Triangle was a female-driven thriller while Creep was a horror feature. But there’s always something different to Smith’s films, which makes them worth seeking out. Shot in Germany, Black Death looks beautiful and features convincing set designs, everyone making the most of what was surely a very limited budget . And it has Carice van Houten, the gorgeous spy in Zwartboek, whom I failed to recognise. 

Black Death is brutal and grisly, as befits its type, yet contains a single scene of battle. The film’s interesting contradictions make for absorbing viewing in spite of some unimaginative dialogue.

My son, my son, what have ye done?

 

Lionel Shriver’s book "We Need to Talk About Kevin" (2003) floored me. Those who have read the book understand that I cannot go into too much detail in a discussion of either book or film (yet), but I can testify to how successfully Shriver used her protagonist, distraught mother Eva, to elaborate on terrible events through a series of letters. I am not a fan of book-film comparisons, as each medium should be judged according to its own merit. So I’ll say this: the book accomplishes more as a book than the film does as a film.

When we are introduced to Eva (Tilda Swinton, haunted and vulnerable, deserving of an Oscar nomination she didn't get) she is living alone in a run-down house in a working class neighbourhood. Through a series of flashbacks, we come to understand that her family had been massively traumatised. This trauma, a shocking violence which extends to the lives of many other individuals, is deeply personal to Eva. The film shows us Eva in happier times, like those she had with her husband Franklin (John C. Reilly), and shows the origins of her eventual despair: the birth of their son Kevin (played as a teenager by Ezra Miller). From the start, there’s something off about Kevin. Even as a toddler, he looks at his mother from under his brow like a crocodile measuring its prey from just below the water surface. Franklin grows increasingly annoyed at Eva’s suggestions that Kevin is unstable, even when something bad befalls their young daughter Celia (Ashley Gerasimovich).

We Need to Talk About Kevin is directed by Lynne Ramsey, who uses a variety of shot types and filters to suggest emotion and turmoil, and who uses red to extensive effect to signify death, blood and the pressure of time. In addition, the film is a faithful adaptation of the thematic and narrative essence of the book: to what an extent is Kevin born evil, if ‘evil’ is the most appropriate word, and to what an extent is Eva’s attitude towards her eldest partly responsible for the person he becomes? But to focus only on these issues would detract from the film’s representation of grief and guilt. This is a thematically accomplished film, one with some superbly filmed and highly unsettling scenes that make for a clinical drama about parents, children and the inescapability of the shaping forces that exist between them.

Judging by the complete audience silence when the film was over – not a gasp, not a cough – those who come to the film unprepared by its backstory should find themselves considerably shaken. Note that while the film is upsetting and has an age restriction of 16VLS, there is almost no sex (just a brief silhouetted scene), only some swearing (far less than what you hear on an HBO show) and the violence occurs mostly, almost exclusively, off-screen. The age restriction oversells the content and invites misguided expectations.

The rest of the review goes into massive spoiler territory, so please don’t read on if you haven’t seen the film. Again, massive spoiler warning (for the film and the book).

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The book is presented as a series of letters from Eva to Franklin. Clearly they had separated, and he retained custody of Celia. The letters make reference to the high school slaughter that Kevin and his bow were responsible for. Only at the end does Eva, having worked through her guilt, anger and lack of understanding, present a detailed, researched overview of what Kevin did to his classmates. It’s a powerful finale to the book, and while I understand that much of cinema’s success lies in its powers of suggestion, the film lacks a final punch by not showing anything that happens inside the school gym. The book ends with a final major blow: the revelation that Franklin and Celia were, in fact, Kevin’s first murder victims. The film drops the first person narration, and it should be pretty clear to most viewers that Franklin and Celia’s fate is sealed in blood. There is no element of surprise in the film.

While the film refrains from showing the final bloodshed, it does go into stylistic overkill at times. Late in the film, the clearly psychopathic Kevin cannot just eat a litchi. He has to peel it in close up, then insert it into his mouth in extreme close-up, then chew it so the juices run over his chin, etc. It makes sense in the aftermath of what he’d done to Celia, but I could’ve done without the visual spoonfeeding. Shorter scenes, as when Eva walks in on Kevin while he’s masturbating and he doesn’t bat an eye at her seeing him (on the contrary, actually), are more powerful because they lack the excesses that weigh down other scenes.
 

Much of the film plays out as a highlight reel of Kevin-being-evil moments, which actually undermines his threatening presence. If a character is evil all the time and you don’t get to see much of a functioning family that he’s threatening to destroy, some tension is lost. I’ve seen comparisons between this film and Rosemary’s Baby, but really, this contemporary take on evil cannot be positioned alongside Polanski’s urban horror. We Need to Talk About Kevin is very good indeed, but it is far from great.

Memories, dreams, violations

 

The skin is the human body’s largest organ: it presents a thin but mostly effective barrier against the world outside, protecting the other organs, muscles and tissue gathered inside. It’s nonetheless prone to scratches, boils, laceration and tearing. The relative fragility of the skin seems to bother Dr Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) quite a bit. His research, which takes him into transgenesis and some other forms of unethical practices, is focused on fabricating a type of skin that can resist most forms of damage. He has a human test subject, the breathtakingly beautiful Vera (Elena Anaya), with whom he seems to have a Stockholm-like relationship. And when he comes home at night after presenting his research to sceptical and concerned peers, he knows that she’s waiting for him: he watches her on a large screen that shows his subject reading, doing yoga or looking back.

Sscreenshot source: www.io9.com

Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In is a dark mad scientist story, and any familiarity what that trope warns us that the scientist’s monster struggles with its loyalty towards its master. The ambiguity of the relationship between master and subject here is very stimulating, as power can shift to either side given specific circumstances. Ledgard even has a henchwoman, Marilia (Marisa Paredes), whose mature, lined beauty contrasts with the smoothness of Vera’s perfect face. Almodovar’s film is all lines, smoothness and surfaces, both in what we see happening on screen in deliberately designed compositions and also in how the film is cut together. It’s a film about control, desire and the filmmaker’s love for the medium, in particular its voyeuristic and surveillance-based capacities.

In dealing with control and desire as lived and constructed by the mad scientist, The Skin I Live In is a thriller made by someone who understands the basic formula of the genre and its conventions and knows as well how to shape these patterns and forms to his advantage. The master behind All About My Mother and Talk To Her has been making movies about women (and this current film again evidences the director’s adoration of the female form) for over thirty years, and his eye is confident and assured. The first half of the film inserts the viewer into the film in media res, and the plot culminates in a significant event before taking the viewer into the characters' past. In this part of the film we learn something about the doctor’s reasons for conducting his research, and it is here that Almodovar takes, I think, considerable pleasure in destabilising expectations and characters.

The Skin I Live In is a film of many pleasures. It’s melodramatic at times, chilling at others. There is some nudity, some violence, and a tiger who licks a television screen. Banderas delivers an intense performance, while Anaya seems to be replacing Penelope Cruz, if only for a while, as Almodovar’s siren. I haven’t even touched yet on the idea of gender – or on related ideas of identity – which is somewhat of a magnificent obsession for the filmmaker. I think it’ll suffice to say that this film will lead to some lively discussions on the matter. 

 

The Skin I Live In is visually sumptuous and thematically adventurous filmmaking, with an ending that would seem forced in lesser films but feels perfect in this one. The film’s perversions are provocative and beautifully executed. I’ve spent two days remembering and revisiting the film, and I must admit: I am in love.

Cult Status

A Sundance favourite and award winner, Sean Durkin’s debut feature Martha Marcy May Marlene (henceforth MMMM) tells the story of Martha (also known as Marcy May, and sometimes answering the phone as Marlene), played by Elizabeth Olsen (she’s the talented one), who escapes from a cultish farm set-up as the film begins. Her estranged sister Lucy (Sarah Poulson), whom she hasn’t spoken to in two years, picks her up and takes her to a lakeside house where Martha, Lucy and Lucy’s husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) will struggle to come to terms with Martha’s post-cult ‘condition’. In flashbacks we see what living on the farm entailed for Martha: no inhibitions regarding sexual privacy and nudity; occasional rape; subservience to the males on the farm.

It should make for riveting viewing. But MMMM is pretentious, self-indulgent, and tedious when it should be compelling. The main reasons to watch the film is to see the birth of a fine new actor (Olsen) and to see the great character actor John Hawkes (Winter’s Bone) exude creepiness and danger in a homely, sometimes disarming manner as Patrick the cult patriarch.

MMMM barely works as a character drama or thriller in spite of some successfully unsettling images and themes. It’s slow in a self-indulgent manner, as if the film does not know when to move on from one scene to the next. The story structure – flipping back and forth between past and present – simply highlights how much more exciting the farm-based material is than the present-day lake house scenes with Martha and her family (and even the farm-based scenes get boring – scenes and shots go on and on long after they’ve done their job). I question whether this non-linear style really contributes anything to the themes and contents of the film. If something happens in the present – Martha goes swimming in the lake completely nude – then there’s a past section to tell us why she swims naked. There’s nothing fresh about the approach. 

While Olsen’s Martha is a solid character, someone who’d been damaged long before arriving on Patrick’s farm and who convincingly struggles to come to terms with what has happened to her, Lucy is little more than an emotional sounding board and Ted seems to be constructed almost wholly on his British accent. Olsen, like the brave Gabourey Sidibe in that terrible piece of exploitation Precious, delivers a performance that deserves a much better film. I’ll give MMMM credit for avoiding the “woman-as-victim” cliché and for its thrilling open ending, but overall the film is a frustrating slog.

Still elementary

As the saying goes, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” right? That must be Guy Ritchie’s mantra, as the sequel to his Holmes hit movie from two years ago is as light, flighty and inconsequential as its predecessor. If there is any real improvement worth mentioning, it’s that Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows boasts a better villain and has greater scope than the original. Also, Stephen Fry has a small role, and a little bit of Fry goes a long way.

Holmes (Robert Downey Jr) is hot on the trail of his nemesis, Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris), an esteemed academic and criminal mastermind. Although right-hand man Watson (Jude Law) is getting married soon, Holmes manages to draw his sidekick into his dangerous investigation as they begin to unravel a plot worthy of the greatest megalomaniacal movie villains. During their attempts to stop Moriarty’s plans from actualising, they also meet up with a gypsy (Noomi Rapace) whose brother is somehow involved in the professor’s plans.

Moriarty is, as Holmes fans have often stated, a solid foil for Holmes. As played by Mad Men’s Jared Harris, the professor is cultured, coldly intelligent and determined to see his plans through. With one or two exceptions Harris nearly underplays the character, making him seem even more threatening. Downey Jr is his familiar self as Holmes, sometimes seeming to channel the Johnny-Depp-is-Jack Sparrow school of acting. Happily, Law’s Watson seems more actively involved with the events this time round.

As required by its type, the film is fast paced and peppered with humour in between things blowing up and people being shot at. There’s a lot that blows up, and there’s lots of shooting, and in all of it Holmes and Watson exchange some delicious double entendres (remember the trailer for the first film? You know what I mean). A Game of Shadows is fittingly drained of primary colours, thereby enhancing its semi-steampunk appeal, while Ritchie exploits his slowed down action techniques repeatedly. The sound design is either superb or ridiculous, depending on the extent to which you can tolerate Ritchie’s excessive kineticism. 

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is easily the equal of the first film, and should have no trouble pleasing fans of the first outing. If a popcorn driven, easily digestible detective story with some considerable fireworks is all you want, A Game of Shadows awaits – as long as popcorn, detective thrills and fireworks really are all you want. There’s precious little more to the film than that.

Men Who Hate Women

 

Stieg Larsson’s globally bestselling Millennium trilogy gave readers a fascinating heroine in Lisbeth Salander, an independent and highly intelligent young woman with tortured black hair and, yes, a dragon tattoo. And some other tattoos. Larsson’s books told a story not only of Salander fighting for justice (particularly of a personal nature) but also of the failure of Sweden to take care of its female citizens; they are often failed by the System as a whole. While the last two Larsson novels are very much Salander-centric, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is first and foremost a murder mystery.

Mikael Blomkvist (also known in the books as “Kalle fucking Blomkvist”), played by steely-eyed Daniel Craig, is a reporter who just lost a case against the formidable and dirty Wennerstrom company. With his savings depleted and having to distance himself from his publication, Millennium, he accepts an invitation from another businessman, Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) to travel to snow covered Hedestad. Here the old man makes Blomkvist a stimulating offer: he would get paid (a lot) to write Vanger’s memoirs, which will act as a cover-up for what the reporter would really be doing – looking to find the killer of Vanger’s niece Harriet, who was murdered 40 years ago.

At the same time, we are introduced to Salander (Rooney Mara, the girlfriend from The Social Network but unrecognisable here), a ward of the state and gifted technology aficionado, who does some freelance work as a researcher for a security company. It is inevitable that she will become part of Blomkvist’s investigation, even though this doesn’t happen immediately.

Much has been said about the book’s themes of misogyny and sexual abuse, and there are scenes in Dragon Tattoo that are difficult to watch. Like the book, the film is not subtle. Fans of the book will find that screenwriter Stephen Zaillian has distilled much of Larsson’s detailed story, cutting the fat to make a lean sexually charged thriller with two interesting lead characters (even if they are less polyamorous here than in the source material).

If it sounds like sordid material, it is, but what elevates the story above conventional genre filmmaking is the presence of the film’s biggest star, director David Fincher. He is fascinated by personalities that fall beyond the norm – the anti-consumerist anti-hero in Fight Club, the compulsive reporter in Zodiac, Zuckerberg in The Social Network and now Salander in Dragon Tattoo. As has been said a thousand times before, he is a visuals driven auteur with a superb eye for shot composition. Even short strands of dialogue are dynamic and invigorating. Fincher’s films usually open with a striking credits sequence of opening scenes. Dragon Tattoo opens with a credit sequence that features a morphing oozing black Salander to the tune of the Reznor-Ross reworking of “The Immigrant Song”. As cliched as it may sound, it made my jaw drop and deserves some award of its own. From such a potent start the film propels onward and forward for more than two and a half hours, although it feels far shorter.

I’ve come to consider Fincher as more accomplished as a visual strategist than as a storyteller. This is not a slight on his storytelling skills but a compliment regarding the former observation. Even when a story runs out of steam as The Social Network does, and when it runs a bit thin as in Dragon Tattoo, the films always look superb. The cinematography by Jeff Cronenweth is suitably cold and precise; look at the symmetry and balance in some of the shots, and how deliberately attention grabbing it is when something in the shot is off-balance. Cronenweth collaborated with Fincher on Network and Fight Club in what is clearly a mutually beneficial relationship. Filmed on location during one of Sweden’s coldest winters in decades, Dragon Tattoo’s icy and potentially deadly Hedestad reminded me somewhat of The Crimson Rivers, where the snow hid corpses and various dangers.

Those who know the book will notice that Zaillian and Fincher make two key changes towards the end of the film (and I’m talking about changes, not simply content that was omitted, of which there is inevitable a lot): one has to do with a certain secondary character’s fate, the other with the murder mystery itself. It may not sit 100% well with purists but both changes work cinematically, the second change coming across as less convoluted than in the book. The choice of what happens in the film’s last scene is thematically appropriate and character oriented, and closes the film in such a way that were are reminded of what turned out to be most important in the story. 

 

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has thus far failed to meet box-office expectations, possibly because of the film’s long running time, the recent Swedish versions of all three books that are fresh in many people's minds, and general Salander media overkill. I’m hoping that Fincher will be willing to return to the characters for at least a second installment. I haven’t seen the Swedish adaptations; from what I’ve read, the American version remains worth seeing even if you’ve seen the Rapace version (which was, ahem, not directed by David Fincher). The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is gripping, unsettling crime pulp, and makes the best use of an Enya song that I’ve seen in a film.

There can be only one (let's hope)

 

Hoofmeisie, a new Afrikaans tween comedy by Morne du Toit and the team from the Film Factory (purveyors of Bakgat, Bakgat 2, Night Drive and Superhelde), got a rave review from one Afrikaans speaking critic and was lambasted by another critic in the Mail & Guardian who referred to the film as “impossible to watch”. Maybe what these critics and I should admit up front is that we’re not the target market for the film, having passed through primary school many, many years ago. This tale of a bunch of girls (and their mothers - where have all the fathers gone?) competing for the title of “hoofmeisie”, or head girl (the highest rung on the student representative council ladder), is clearly aimed at a very young audience indeed. However, old(er) as we may be, we do have something to say about the difference between good children’s entertainment and bad children’s entertainment. The best children’s entertainment works on most levels for most audiences as there’s something to appreciate for just about everyone. Surely no-one but the very, very young appreciates a mother squeezing out her daughter’s zit only to have its yellow content splash her soccer-mom face? 

Many American tween comedies are also mediocre, but it’s so much more unfortunate that Du Toit and his team chose to borrow from and imitate the worst that the tween comedy genre has to offer: badly written young romance, one-dimensional characters, psycho mothers. It ends up being very predictable, even for a film of its type.

Nadia (Misha’el de Beer) is a sweet natured, intelligent learner at Stumbo Pops Primary. Her BFF is the equally sweet Melissa (Annemicke Kotze) and her secret crush is Rikus (Ruan Wessels), who plays rugby. Thankfully the movie spares us a scene set at a primary school level rugby match, though it gives us instead a netball scene where the players and parents get so worked up that the coach turns a fire extinguisher on them. There are two main antagonists on the netball court and in the rest of the film: Susan (Melissa Massyn), who is sometimes referred to as Su-Satan, and Hetwieg (Jamie Lawrence). These are the girls who the movie shows as in being in contention the head girl title.

The good news, for what it’s worth, is that there are no fart jokes. There are one or two blink-and-you-miss-it attempts at satire. And the young actors are for most part amusing and entertaining, especially Melissa Massyn who on occasion displays a greater sense of comic timing than any adult actor in the film. Poor Hannes Muller. Poor Lida Botha, who seems to play the hyper caricatured version of the grandmother in Roepman. Poor Johan van der Merwe, who plays the stuttering Stumbo Pops principal, Mr Gouws, and ends up with cake on his face. This is a bad film with usually good actors.

How can I say whether a tween audience will think of the film as bad? I cannot, but I did watch the film with an audience consisting of parents and their children, and while there were a few chuckles here and there, there was absolutely no sustained laughter. There are a few jokes aimed at older viewers, but these fall flat; weren’t Malema jokes old a year ago?

There’s a moral to the story that parents will appreciate, I suppose; be true to yourself, be nice to your friends, don’t be nasty to your enemies, and so forth. But in between all of this, there’s a bizarre scene between Mr Gouws and a cleaner (from what I can tell), a young black woman who replaces a photo of Gouws with a framed photograph of Nelson Mandela. This apparently teaches him about merit and doing what’s right. There’s nothing wrong with the sentiment, but the film handles it in such an amateurish fashion it’s cringe worthy – consider how we are supposed to believe that a previously “invisible” black character suddenly initiates change in a middle aged white man’s life. I guess I should mention that the most openly violent and destructive character in the film is Hetwieg, who is non-white; of the four main young females, she also has the least dialogue.

Equally embarrassing is the film’s attempts at safe religiosity. When the film opens, we learn that Nadia is an orphan who resides with her grandmother (Marie Pentz). When Nadia tells her that her parents are looking down at them from heaven, Grandma confesses that she doesn’t believe in “the Bethlehem star” anymore. Surely it is not a spoiler when I say that the film provides an opportunity for Grandma to reconsider this position. Why on earth bring in this theme if you only spend two sentences on it? And such badly written sentences at that? Indeed, the film spends more time on Isak Davel in a red speedo.

Hoofmeisie is a threadbare story that has more product placements than a Bond movie; indeed, there is a scene set during the school’s Entrepreneurial Day that seems to be in the film only to throw together a few brands (and, lest I forget, to get Isak Davel in a speedo). Talking about odd creative decisions: the film tells the majority of its story in flashback, taking its cue from, can you believe it, The Usual Suspects. Where it served a purpose in the latter crime classic, there is no reason why Hoofmeisie should be told like this. The kid behind me told his father that he “didn’t know what is going on”.

I wish I could tell you good things about Hoofmeisie, but I cannot. It’s not enough to have a comedy in Afrikaans; it has to be a funny comedy in Afrikaans. It seems as if too many Afrikaans speaking people are willing to spend money and time on Afrikaans products simply because it’s in Afrikaans and not necessarily because it’s a good film. I’m sure that many people have enjoyed and will enjoy Hoofmeisie with their families in the name of good, clean family viewing, but to those people I want to say: have you seen Whale Rider, The Sandlot, Millions, The Princess Bride? I’ll concede that these movies are not in Afrikaans but they’re much, much better than Hoofmeisie if family viewing is what you’re looking for.

Herge. Spielberg. Snowy.

Using astonishing animation and motion capture technology, Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin uses the "Secret of the Unicorn" angle to assemble some of the key players and put them in a tale of daring and derring-do. There’s Tintin (Jamie Bell), of course, and his canine sidekick Snowy, who predictably steals the movie. Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis) is his usual whiskey-fuelled self; with this performance and that of Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, surely Serkis deserves some kind of special award. Interpol’s bumbling yet oddly effective twosome of Thompson (Simon Pegg) and Thomson (Nick Frost) are present to miss obvious clues and still somehow aid Tintin in his mission to thwart the plans of the nefarious – what a delightful and appropriate word – villain Sakharine (Daniel Craig).

See, Tintin buys a model of a ship at a market stall, only to have it stolen. Being a perceptive reporter type, he knows (and explains to the audience) that there’s something special about the model ship, the Unicorn. His search for the truth and history behind the ship brings him into the path of Sakharine, which in turn brings him into an alliance with Haddock. This is a quest picture pure and simple, which has guided some people to comment on the film as an Indiana Jones adventure. While this comparison has its merits, to call Tintin an Indy variation unfairly takes something away from the new movie in the same way as the set-piece discussions have.

I’ll address both issues simultaneously. There’s a structural formula to the Indy movies: each film opens with a memorable set piece that sets the bar for the excitement and spectacle of the film. Think of the rolling boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Shanghai showdown in Temple of Doom. Then there’s a female interest that sometimes functions as the sidekick as well. Towards the end of these movies, Indy and his cohort(s) are captured and their inevitable escape signals the beginning of the end for the bad guys (and the film itself). None of this happens in The Adventures of Tintin. Yes, there’s something of the spirit of Indiana Jones in Tintin, visually and in the storytelling, but Tintin is an established character in his own right in his own identifiable universe. An Indy-Tintin comparison doesn’t get one that far at all.

Tintin is almost completely devoid of females; it really is a boys’ adventure movie. And when, in the comics, did Tintin have a love interest? His focus was always getting the story (and staying alive). Tintin takes a good forty five minutes to introduce characters and clarify their relationships. While there are some exciting moments, these are seldom more than a quick chase or swift escape. It’s nothing like the roller coaster rides that the Indy movies offer. Tintin gathers momentum, and when the scenes of spectacle arrive in the second half of the film they are so much more impressive because of how the film has held back up until then. In this sense, it is also nothing like recent actioners such as Ghost Protocol that seem to have stories based around stunts, and not much else. This brings me to the film’s genius: what it does with memory and transitions.

The technology of computer animation allows Spielberg to transition from one place to another without a traditional edit. Instead of cutting from Tintin and Haddock in Place A to Thompson and Thomson in Place B, Place A becomes, for a moment, part of the visual composition of the Place B – it has to be seen to really be appreciated. The technique is particularly impressive in scenes dealing with Haddock’s memory. As he locates fragments of memories that slowly begin to form a cohesive whole, the film takes us to and from the memory (set many, many years earlier) and where Haddock and Tintin currently are. In one shot, for example, a character in the memory pulls a sword; for a moment it seems as if Haddock’s face is reflected in the blade, and then the camera moves in on the face in the reflection as it quickly becomes the actual face of Haddock recounting his memories to Tintin. A similar shot takes us back to the memory, and then back to the telling, and so on. This is more jaw dropping than anything else in the film. 

To be sure, the last twenty minutes do suggest a rollercoaster as the bravura chase sequence demonstrates. And there’s a traditional sword duel between two old enemies that doesn’t feature swords but uses a suitable substitute instead, to great excitement. Overall there is a lot of background detail to flesh out Tintin’s world, and the beautifully stylised opening credits sequence tells a complete adventure itself, even before the film has properly started. Considering how atrocious the Asterix adaptations have been, there’s a lot to be thankful for with The Adventures of Tintin, and much to look forward to with Peter Jackson’s sequel.