Movie Review: The Adventures of TinTin

At the risk of severely angering any European or African fans of Alabama Liberal (all…well I was going to say “all two of them” but there are probably as many people on other continents reading the site as those in Alabama itself), I have to admit right off the bat that I was a little disappointed with this movie. The visuals are great but the story…well…we’ll get to that.

What Works: The visuals really are incredible. There was one sequence in the desert where loose sand whispered off the dunes in such a convincing way that it actually felt MORE convincing than most live action movies. By the way, this is one of the few movies I wished I would have seen in 3D. I saw the regular 2D TinTin and I’ll bet it’s not nearly as impressive as in 3D.

What Doesn’t Work: The characters are thin. Tintin himself is kind-of an idiot (he’s probably the world’s least observant child detective) and the movie leans too hard on Captain Haddock’s drunken loudness to substitute for humor. And the story is never all that interesting, with a convoluted plot that I gave up on following after a while, and that didn’t really seem to matter…which is an even worse problem.

What I Would Have Done Differently: I understand the books are enormously popular in Europe and parts of Africa but not so much in the United States. So maybe I’m not the target audience for this and others will relate to the movie a lot more. Still, I’d be surprised if even Tintin hardcores were really rushing to see this movie (which feels very sluggish too often) two and three times. The best thing would be if they had picked a different story out of the dozens of Tintin books to chose from, but, again, I don’t know the material well enough to say if any of the other books are better.