A Visual Feast For The Eyes, But A Storytelling Disappointment: A Few Thoughts On The Adventures Of Tintin

(Above image taken from TheMovieDB.org)

The Adventures Of Tintin is a grand, swashbuckling, globetrotting delight that re-captures the magic of classic adventure serials and the original Hergé comics wonderfully. The gorgeous computer animation and motion capture is the real draw of this film and still looks great today. It manages to avoid the uncanny valley almost entirely with an eye for detail that you'd expect from one of the greatest visual effects studios on Earth, Weta Digital. The performances are excellent and match the colourful cast of characters perfectly, and they shine their best in the plentiful moments of action and humour. And though the jokes often involve slapstick or close-to-toilet humour, much of the comedy in the comics was like that so it's actually pretty authentic to what the original works contained. 

My only major complaint is how formulaic and predictable the narrative is. There's little-to-no mystery about who the villain is, but the film still takes its sweet time to unfold the (non)mystery for us. This unnecessary deliberation on the villain's identity and ancestry is compounded by just how rushed and anti-climatic the ending feels. It also doesn't help matters that it straight up ends on sequel bait. This isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but considering the sequel has been in apparent development hell for the past eight years, that's a pretty long time to wait on a followup to a story that just stops rather suddenly. I also thought the score was kinda forgettable, which is a shame considering it's composed by the much-esteemed John Williams. There's not a single song I could point to that stood out to me or that could I even remember off the top of my head. But at least it mostly gets the job done, even if it mimics a lot of Williams' older work (particularly the Indiana Jones series).

Overall: Though I think the narrative and pacing is very flawed, I still enjoyed this film quite a bit, having been a fan of the original Hergé comics for most of my life. Check it out if you want a fun action-adventure film that takes very few risks with its storytelling.