The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

Certain things imbibed in youth stick with you always. Stories and characters that make up the fabric of your childhood end up more precious to you than anything as an adult. Some things, though, adopt a gloss in retrospect that makes them appear more special than they really were. The Adventures of Tintin series, by famed Belgium cartoonist Herge, is not one of those things. It was and remains detailed, superb, and unrelentingly spirited. Rivalled only by his arch-nemesis Asterix for the affections of young readers, Tintin was a plucky young reporter who never seemed to do any actual reporting, possessed an outsized strength, an unquenchable thirst for globe-trotting adventure, and a small, white, interactive dog. Often accompanied by his good friends, Captain Haddock (the master of creative swearing) and the blundering "twin" detectives Thomson and Thompson, each Tintin adventure was in itself a small film.

Strange, then, that Steven Spielberg's (whom you may have heard of) and Peter Jackson's (whom you also may have heard of) cinematic treatment of Tintin & Co. feels the need to blend three of Herge's stories into one outing. The film itself is a synthesis of The Crab With the Golden Claws (a classic adventure in which Tintin first encounters Haddock) and the two-part Red Rackham's Treasure and The Secret of the Unicorn, which detail the recovery of Haddock's family treasure, taking some necessary creative license with both. Having the film re-interpret this particular batch of stories does, on paper, make a lot of sense: they introduce major characters and work well as a pretty cohesive narrative. While the hybrid story is handled well-enough, however, it soon becomes apparent that, for Tintin aficionados, something which made each of the stories special has been lost. Now, this may simply be the somewhat-demented perspective of a long-time fan, and more casual viewers may think it fussy. And they may well be right. Being incapable, however, of placing my baggage aside, I can't escape the feeling that the composite story lacks the development which made the originals so satisfying.

But the film also lacks something from a different perspective. The direction begins well enough - evoking the comfortingly familiar, suburban European settings in which Tintin's adventures usually kick-off in a slowly-paced and reassuring way. Once the action switches to the larger scale, however, it becomes too frantic and cartoonish. The CGI backgrounds are impressive enough, but often resemble a tie-in video game more than a real world location. Spielberg seems to want to out-perform Michael Bay in the large-scale demolition stakes, with the wanton destruction of a North African city during the film's chase scenes being the most obvious example. Again, to a devotee of the comics, this comes over as jarring and too outlandish for a series which was always grounded in reality. Kids might love it (and if their reception at the screening I attended is anything to go by, they'll eat it up) but there's precious little of what made Tintin so compelling to a slightly older audience. To cap it all off, the outcome of these high-wire pyrotechnics was, I'm afraid, nothing but boredom - we've seen all this before, in one form or another, and it strikes you as a wasted opportunity more than anything else.

None of this traditionalist groaning should, however, count against the virtues of the film simply as an action-adventure, which gets a lot of mileage out of the performances of Jamie Bell (forever known as Billy Elliot) as Tintin, and Andy Serkis (likewise, forever known as Gollum) as Haddock. If they had been given a more linear and developed story, with fewer visual extravagances (to which 3D surprisingly adds little), then the film could have been carried by their performances. But even their superb channelling of the characters isn't enough to dismiss the feeling that this simply isn't a Tintin film; it feels instead like Tintin is merely a convenient peg on which Spielberg can hang an action film which looks and sounds more like an Indiana Jones rerun than a distinctive embodiment of Herge's creation. As a final kick in the teeth, the much adored theme from the cartoon series (see below) is neglected in favour of an Indiana-style march. In sum, then, while it remains an above average film which will easily secure an audience, The Secret of the Unicorn will probably leave Tintin fans who had hoped for something special deeply disappointed.

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