Euphoric, hybrid and explosive: the Tintin revolution (review)
Steven Spielberg’s film celebrates its 12th anniversary, in replay on France.TV.
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is a hybrid adventure film torn between Jackson, Spielberg and Hergé. Exciting ! While he has just celebrated his twelfth birthday, and France.TV offers it for the occasion for free in replay, we are republishing reviews of First : yes, in the plural, because upon its release, this adaptation was a slap in the face for the editorial staff.
Review by Gérard Delorme: When Steven Spielberg announced that it was partnering with Peter Jackson to adapt Tintin in computer graphics, we all said to ourselves that finally, this project as old as comics themselves was going to become reality. So, what is the verdict at the end of the first Parisian screening?
From the first sequence, we are tempted to say yes: with Jamie Bell, whose movements were recorded in performance capture, Tintin lives and moves without betraying his paper model. Snowy is also very good, the Dupondts a little less so, and the exhibition gets to the heart of the matter very quickly. A flea market is an opportunity to pay homage to comics by quoting the main characters from the albums on which the film is inspired (The Secret of the Unicorn, Red Rackham’s Treasure et The crab with golden claws), up to Hergé who appears as a street designer.
The multiplication of mirrors insistently invites us to look into the past and make connections with the respective legacies of the three authors. Because Tintin may well be signed Spielbergit is truly a hybrid film, a sum, the fusion of three very close universes which only asked to be united.Hergé welcomes Peter Jackson (that of King Kongwhich is found throughout the first part with the navy “modern”), while Spielberg delights in recycling all the motifs from his exotic adventure cinema, Indiana Jones in the lead. But he also takes the opportunity to achieve here what he had missed with Hook. He even allows himself to find some surprising flashes of his period 1941. And it is difficult not to see in both the main characters of the representations of the two filmmakers: voluntarily or not, Haddock resembles Peter Jacksonand Sakharine (his enemy) to Steven Spielberg.
Hybridization is found in all areas
It is necessary to reach the wide variety of target audiences, which differ depending on whether or not they know comics and speak English or not. In V0, the film is clearly intended for an English-speaking audience, and the French may be surprised (it will be interesting to check how Tintin sounds in VF). Those familiar with the comics are advancing on familiar ground: the adaptation is fairly faithful to the source. The English in England (where Tintin is quite popular) paradoxically risk feeling the most at homelargely because the characters are played by Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg And Nick Frost. Americans will discover a new hero (Tintin is new in America), but the universe close to King Kong and D’Indiana Jones is very familiar to them.
Visually, the film begins in a European city (possibly Belgian), before evolving in a spatio-temporal environment typical of this type of adventure film (a naval combat on the open sea, chases in the Moroccan casbah and desert, without forgetting some aerial adventures). Without revealing too much what is happening, Steven Spielberg takes full advantage of the possibilities of computer-generated images to represent things impossible in real shots. Sometimes it works terribly well (the secret weapon), sometimes a little less.
When Tintin (in a replica scene of the descent in the wagons of the Cursed Temple) climbs walls with his motorbike and hangs from electric wires to chase a hawk, it’s hard to keep up. The fall of the giant gorilla and the dinosaurs in King Kong worked, because there was a sense of gravity that anchored the scene, providing the characters with dimension, weight, and ultimately reality. In Tintin (as elsewhere), this reality is called into question as soon as the characters free themselves from the laws of gravity. The old axiom of “suspension of disbelief” takes a hit. Question of balance. But we are not going to blame Spielberg for wanting to push the envelope. The result is still euphoric, a concentrate of adventure from Belgium, America, and New Zealand. Here we wait for the sequel.
Andy Serkis: “I want to play Captain Haddock again!”
Criticism by François Grelet: It must be a question of speed. Why write a text on The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, just a few hours after the end of the press screening, which took place this morning in a large cinema on the Champs Elysées? “Because it’s the internet, commie, the race for clicks, the tweeters are already on the scene, come on, sooner rather than later, throw out your criticism. 140 space signs included, eh”. Why is it so complicated to write a text on The Secret of the Unicorn just a few hours after the end of the press screening, which took place this morning in a large cinema on the Champs Elysées? There also because it went a little too quickly. What did the 90’s tweeters write when they got caught The Blade Or Time And Tide in the face?
Balanced like that, the comparison may seem curious, but that does not prevent the uninterrupted and hysterical creative outburst that we witness during the 107 minutes of Secret of the unicorninstantly reminds us that if we have called for a long time Tsui Hark, “The Chinese Spielberg”, the analogy now works the other way. And since he began his transformation as an openly radical filmmaker (roughly from the fabulous AI) Steven Spielberg had never dared to push the envelope of furious experimentation so far. The advantage of filmmakers nursed in classicism is that the experimental is never considered for them as an end in itself, or as a vague screen of chic smoke, (yes, we are thinking very strongly here of the last film of Nicolas Winding Refn), but rather an elegant way of paving the way for the cinema of tomorrow. Rushing into the breach opened by James Cameron, Robert Zemeckisthe Wachowski brothers, even David Fincher, Spielberg takes hold of his virtual camera to completely rethink the basics of old-fashioned storytelling.
The most beautiful moments of his Tintin are located there, in this way of daring impossible transitions to give the story a crackling dynamism, of reinventing the binary rhythm of the alternating montage to infuse it with more nuances (watch out for the flashback sequence), of think of each scene from the sole angle of the bravery piece and to undermine the received idea according to which a film must spare its viewer with moments of hesitation, more commonly called “breathing”. The good joke. So it goes quickly, very quickly, too quickly for us to really have time to taste everything. But enough so that we want the tempo to never drop.
Let’s stay calm. Post-cinema, over-cinema, yes, everywhere, all the time. But also, let’s drop the big words, a real auteur film. Everything is there, more or less in order: the destructive fury of 1941the dazzling bouts of fever of Cursed Templethe expressionist vignettes of Lost Worlda generic Stop me if you cana twisting nod to Sea teeth… We will also, inevitably, come across an – admirable – overhaul of Hook, as soon as the adventure heads towards the swashbuckler side (or pirate film). We take this as a clue: as if we had to take revenge for a failure that still hasn’t been digested, as if someone were sneaking up on us that yesterday’s cinema was too restrictive to convey the omnipotence of the imagination. Spielbergian. Hot intuition: we are not necessarily sure that we have here the masterpiece of its author, but we clearly find ourselves facing the clearest, most obvious expression of his cinema. Because the freest, so far.
Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson: “On Tintin, technology was the filmmaker’s tool of liberation”
There remains the work of adaptation. Here again, we really wouldn’t want to go overboard, but know that it frankly leaves you speechless, bringing together three key albums of mythology with a fluidity and a freedom of tone that is astounding. The only problem is that the Dupondts, strangely under-exploited, never very amusing, look a little pale upon arrival, while the phenomenal charisma of Haddock fromAndy Serkis absolutely wins all the votes (it even lets a strange post-hangover melancholy emerge for the duration of a scene or two). Here again we will have to rewatch the film, if it ever allows itself to be tamed, to gauge the relevance of its dramatic choices; all the same, a total burlesque ease and its balance between virtuosity of the staging and total incarnation of the characters stand out. The irony in this is that this triumph of ultra-technological cinema, profoundly pioneering, will tumble into the theaters at the very moment when the virtual intelligentsia (twittos and blogs) feeds almost daily on its unreasonable hatred towards 3D and/or performance capture (or even the shameful treatment reserved for the latest Zemeckis). In this sense, Spielberg’s response is scathing. Even if it’s likely that deep down he never gave a damn. Too busy reshaping our future, rethinking the tools of cinema, updater its grammar. This man goes fast, very fast, too fast for ordinary mortals. Who will be able to follow him now?
Trailer for Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn :
