Blistering barnacles!

Steven Spielberg’s Tintin movie scores on animation and technology but takes liberties with the original comic series.

For any Tintin fan, the idea of a movie on the young Belgian reporter directed by Steven Spielberg would be an exciting — and reassuring — thought. Surely if anybody could do justice to the screen adaptation of the classic comic books created by Hergé, it was Spielberg. Hergé thought so himself. That’s why after his death, his wife decided to give Spielberg the rights to make a movie on The Adventures of Tintin. That was in 1983. Nearly 30 years later, Spielberg’s first Tintin film is out. And billions of blue blistering barnacles, anyone who knows Hergé’s Tintin won’t really be happy with it!

 

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is in fact three Tintin comics rolled into one movie —The Crab with the Golden Claws (1941), The Secret of the Unicorn (1943) and Red Rackham’s Treasure (1944). There’s nothing really wrong in that, given that Spielberg needed to introduce certain characters to viewers getting a taste of Tintin for the first time. So Captain Haddock, with his rich stock of colourful insults, meets Tintin for the first time in The Secret of the Unicorn, though in the series he appears two comics earlier.

The movie opens with Tintin (Jamie Bell) and his dog, Snowy, in a market. Tintin spots a model of a 17th century ship, Unicorn, and no sooner does he buy it than he gets an offer from a lanky, bearded man to sell it to him at whatever the price. The ship it turns out belonged to the ancestor of Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis) and was carrying a secret cargo when it was attacked and taken over by pirates, led by the dreaded Red Rackham. Haddock’s ancestor manages to kill Rackham and sink the ship, along with the pirates and the secret cargo of treasure. Three parchments hidden in the masts of three such ship models alone can lead to the treasure. Now Red Rackham’s descendent, Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine (Daniel Craig), is out to get the treasure and avenge his ancestor’s death by killing Haddock. Only in the book Sakharine isn’t the sinister character he is made out to be in the movie but an unfortunate victim himself. Many other such liberties have been taken with Hergé’s stories.

The essence of the characters too hasn’t always been captured. Haddock whose hair and beard are always disheveled is given a chubbier, neater look. And he says uncharacteristic things such as, “I know these waters better than the warts on my mother’s face.” Worse, the whiskey-guzzling, fiery-tempered seaman is made to do the unthinkable: kick the bottle while Tintin nods in approval. But there are also those classic rib-tickling sequences like a traumatised Haddock stumbling out to protect his eardrums when the appallingly loud Bianca Castafiore unleashes the power of her vocal chords that can shatter even bulletproof glass.

The animation, however, is brilliant and the film is among the finest examples of motion capture technology. The thrilling chase for the parchments through a Moroccan port town finds Spielberg in his element. The five-minute long sequence through the picturesque setting has been shot in one go at the end of which, the audience — a mix of under-eight to over-fifty-year-olds — actually clapped in the cinema hall. But the overall plot is weak and nothing more than a series of sequences put together. Let’s hope the sequel — Spielberg plans one — is more like Hergé’s Tintin.