THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN: I’ll Not Be Doubted by Some Pipsqueak Tuft of Ginger and His Irritating Dog

The Adventures of Tintin (2011) – Directed by Steven Spielberg – Starring Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig, Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, Tony Curran, and Toby Jones.

I don’t have much history with Hergé’s Tintin, so I come to this movie rather clean – no preconceived notions, no emotional history, no expectations of any kind. I have so little history with the character that if you had shown me a picture of Tintin, I could have told you his name, I could have told you he was a Hergé creation, and … that’s it. I knew so little about Tintin that I didn’t know the name of his dog. I didn’t even know Tintin was a journalist. Heck, I didn’t even know he was an adult; I thought he was a 15-year old kid or something.

So, yeah. I’m rather blank on this topic.

That said, it’s hard not to get excited about a project that features the combined talents of Steven Spielberg (director), Peter Jackson (producer), and Steven Moffat (co-writer), especially when all three men have plenty of other projects on their creative plates. Since they’re working with an established property, it’s a pretty easy leap to see that this project must have been a labor of love for them.

And that’s really what ADVENTURES OF TINTIN feels like to me – a love letter to a character and series. (Hergé and his drawing of Tintin even make an appearance in the film’s opening scene.) TINTIN is a beautifully rendered film and a completely satisfying adventure about a journalist (Jamie Bell) and his sidekick dog (his name is Snowy) who track down a missing treasure. What I love about the movie is how it manages to feel both large and small at the same time. For all of the globe-trotting and treasure hunting, it’s also a simple story about a dude and his dog who get caught up in something beyond what they had ever anticipated would come from buying a model of a 17th century ship at an outdoor market.

Tintin buys the model of the Unicorn and instantly one man (Barnaby, an FBI agent is disguise) tells him to get rid of it and another man, Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine (Daniel Craig), offers to buy it from him at any price. There’s no reason for Tintin to keep the model other than he likes it, but the efforts of these two men make him realize there’s something unique about the model. He takes it home to study it, but the ship is broken when Snowy and an interloping cat get in a tussle and tear through the apartment. A small metal cylinder falls out of one of the broken masts, but Snowy isn’t able to get Tintin to see it and it slides under a dresser.

After heading to the library to do research (with Snowy in tow) on the ship, Tintin returns home to find the model stolen and his apartment ransacked. Tintin’s response is to do the pure boy adventurer move – he goes to Marlinspike Hall, the country estate of Captain Haddock, the former captain of the Unicorn. There’s a great bonding scene between Snowy and the estate’s guard dog which allows Tintin to break into the estate, and once inside he is set upon by the estate’s butler and Sakharine. Tintin sees a model of the Unicorn and assumes it’s his, but then Sakharine reminds him that his model was broken, while the one before him is in perfect condition.

Upon returning home, Snowy is finally able to get Tintin to look under the dresser, where he finds the cylinder. Inside the cylinder is an actually a rolled-up parchment that contains a clue to a missing treasure. The FBI agent returns but gets shot by unseen assailants, and Tintin gets kidnapped and brought about Sakharine’s ship. The best part of this sequence is Snowy’s determination to not let the kidnappers get out of sight, and the loyal dog ends up sneaking about the ship and helping Tintin escape and partaking in the adventure.

On the ship, Tintin meets Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), who’s kept in a state of permanent drunkeness in order to all Sakharine full run of the ship. A whole slew of adventures happen after this – on the ship, in a boat, on a plane, in the desert, on the docks … it all moves swiftly and effortlessly as Sakharine and Tintin compete to find the third model of the Unicorn for the final piece of the riddle. There’s an historical parallel at play in TINTIN: Haddock is the descendant of the original Captain Haddock, who sunk his ship so it wouldn’t fall into the hands of Red Rackham, who just so happens to be Sakharine’s ancestor. Eventually, Sakharine is captured and Tintin and Haddock find a part of the sunken treasure in Marlinspike Hall, and agree to keep looking for the rest, setting up a sequel that Peter Jackson has said he wants to direct.

ADVENTURES OF TINTIN is a wonderful film, fun and fanciful, full of life, energy, and brilliant color. TINTIN is Spielberg’s first animated movie (though he shot much of the film using motion capture), but the world he (and the digital artists at WETA) create is alive and beautiful. While I didn’t read the TINTIN stories as a kid, it feels familiar to the stories I did read. The adventure narrative is preposterous but the characters are grounded, and because they feel real it’s easy to follow along with them on this crazy ride. Despite all the darkness at play in the film with the near-constant threat of violence, a wondrous sense of optimism and permeates the movie.

I’ll be buying TINTIN for the collection and I’m already looking forward to Jackson’s sequel.

THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK: From Capitalist to Naturalist in Four Years

The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) – Directed by Steven Spielberg – Starring Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Vanessa Lee Chester, Arliss Howard, Pete Postlethwaite, Vince Vaughn, Richard Schiff, Peter Stormare, Harvey Jason, Thomas F. Duffy, and Richard Attenborough.

Follow along on Twitter.

Water seeks its own level, and eventually, films do, as well.

I hated THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK when it came out. I loved the original film’s mix of wonder and thrills, and so it is perhaps not surprising that I wasn’t as taken with THE LOST WORLD’s darker tone, lesser characters, simpler philosophy, and Vince Vaughn.

Time allows for a reconsideration, of course, and 15 years on, my dislike of THE LOST WORLD has cooled enough that I’ve become much more neutral on the film. I can appreciate what Spielberg is attempting here and there are parts of LOST WORLD that I outright like. The film is not without significant deficiencies, however, in terms of story, character, and philosophy.

I’ll say this right from the start – this is probably going to turn out to be one of those reviews that I don’t really like to write, in that there’s going to be a lot more focus on the negative than the positive. I wrote this same kind of review the other day when I tackled THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR, and there’s a lot of similarities between that film and this one in terms of my overall reaction. Both films are perfectly fine time wasters and both can serve a point – if you loved the first two MUMMY movies (like I did), where else are you gonna go to see these characters or even that kind of story? Similarly, if you love dinosaurs, where else are you gonna go to get better dino action than the JURASSIC PARK franchise?

Whatever problems there are with LOST WORLD, it’s not the dinosaurs. In fact, the combined work of Industrial Light & Magic’s CGI dinos and Stan Winston’s animatronic creatures are individually at the top of their fields and work together beautifully. If you’re a fan of film production, of the art of making movies, then LOST WORLD is a must-see just to appreciate ILM and Stan Winston’s work. And after you’ve watched the movie, do yourself a favor and check out the bonus features; it’s truly gratifying to see people at the top of their respective (and partially competitive) fields working so well together. And that’s to say nothing of the sound technicians who give the dinos such wonderful vocal qualities.

All of which is to say that, production wise, LOST WORLD is high quality entertainment. The dinosaurs look fantastic whether they’re being shot from far away or interacting up close with the humans. There’s a fantastic scene between Julianne Moore and a baby Stegosaurus, and in the bonus features she credits Winston with creating an actual being for her to interact with, making her job easier, and you can see it in the film. The baby dino is all blinking eyes and cuteness, and it’s easy to see how Moore’s character would be drawn in by the baby.

Now, let’s get to the negatives.

The premise of LOST WORLD is a decent enough set-up: John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) has spent the four years between JURASSIC PARK and now going from capitalist to naturalist. He reveals to Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) that there’s a “Site B” on Isla Sorna that the Ingen board wants to strip and monetize. Hammond wants the island preserved and believes the only way for him to save the island is to win the public relations battle, so he wants to send a small expedition to the island to take pictures.

Ian wants no part of this endeavor, in large part because he’s spent the last four years being ridiculed for writing a book about what happened in the first film. Hammond, however, has a secret weapon: Malcolm’s girlfriend Sarah Harding (Moore) is the paleontologist Hammond has chosen, and Sara’s already on the island. Malcolm decides he’s going to go (of course) to get her back, and so he joins equipment expert Eddie Carr (Richard Schiff) and documentarian Nick Van Owen (Vince Vaughn) on what he sees as a rescue mission and they still see as Hammond’s PR expedition.

Here’s where the trouble starts: Malcolm has a daughter, Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester), who seems like a perfectly fine kid with a horrible dad, and you just know she’s going to stow away in one of the vehicles and stick around for the entire movie.

Two problems arise at this point in the film. First, our sarcastic, skirt-chasing mathematician philosopher has been entirely de-fanged in the years between films, and we’re left with a broken, frightened worrier boyfriend/husband. It makes perfect narrative sense, of course, but it puts a drag on the film. If LOST WORLD had balanced Malcolm’s descent with another character’s ascent, this would be all well and good, but the film doesn’t do this. I suppose it tries with Nick, but Vaughn is completely miscast as this secret environmentalist warrior and he spends the bulk of the film looking completely out of place.

Second, we’ve got a kid mucking up the film. Unlike Tim and Lex (Joseph Mazello and Ariana Richards, who make a brief appearance during Malcolm’s visit to see Hammond), Kelly doesn’t add anything to the film. I figured she was here so the film can replicate the Grant/Tim and Lex subplot of a man who doesn’t like kids warming to them, but Ian is such a bad parent and the danger starts so quickly that there’s no arc here at all.

Which brings us to the single largest problem with LOST WORLD: the third act comes out of nowhere.

So, act one, everyone gets to the island and sees that Ingen has sent a bunch of professional hunters. Act two has the two camps forced to work together to try and get off the island, and then act three …

In act three, Ingen puts a Tyrannosaurus Rex and its child on a boat and sends it to San Diego where Spielberg can indulge in his Godzilla fantasies.

It works as a visual experience but it fails the narrative because it jettisons everyone but Malcolm, Sarah, and Hammond’s nephew/Ingen usurper Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard). The film front the Malcolm/Kelly subplot but then when they get to the island, Kelly just gets in the way of the action, and then when we get to the final act, she’s completely missing. In the bonus features, Spielberg says he came up with this ending on the fly, that he felt it’s what the audience wanted and needed to see, and he’s right that it’s fun to see, but he didn’t fully take into account what this new ending did to the story he’d spent the previous 90 minutes constructing.

The philosophical angle in LOST WORLD is also a let down. In the first film the question was whether or not you should do something, but here it’s a simplistic “hunters/observers” dynamic and it’s completely clear that the observers are in the right. The hunters are cartoonishly drawn, and while Pete Postlethwaite does his best to play a convincing Great White Hunter, the character never really works. It’s a shame because Roland Tembo actually has the most significant character arc in the film, as he eventually loses his taste for his killing life and turns his back on Ludlow’s offer to come to work for Ingen full-time.

Tembo is a secondary character, however, and the focus is on Malcolm, Sarah, and Nick. Sarah works rather well, but it’s a bit grating to see Malcolm as such a wet blanket, completely grating every time Nick is on screen, and there’s no real arc for any of them.

The action scenes are good but not great. The film’s main scene is a redo of the iconic T-Rex/Explorer scene from the previous film, except with a bigger vehicle and two Tyrannosaurs. It’s not bad, but it goes on way too long and having Kelly along just so she can be sidelined makes me wonder what Spielberg’s ultimate intent with this character was supposed to be. If you want a darker film, fine, but embrace that darkness and keep the kid at home.

On the whole, THE LOST WORLD isn’t a great movie but it’s a perfectly fine watch. The dinosaurs are fantastic, the story is okay, and the ending is fun to watch even if it sidelines some of the characters. Spielberg feels like he’s on cruise control, but he’s still Spielberg and he can still keep things moving. While LOST WORLD is disappointing compared to JURASSIC PARK – there’s just not much hopeful or awe-inspiring here, at all – it’s a semi-enjoyable watch.

LOST WORLD is darker and more simplistic, but it’s still got all those amazing dinosaurs to look at, and that ain’t a bad way to help you consume a bowl of popcorn.

________

JURASSIC PARK Review Index

JURASSIC PARK: We’re Gonna Make a Fortune with This Place
THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK: From Capitalist to Naturalist in Four Years
JURASSIC PARK III: This How You Play God

JURASSIC PARK: We’re Gonna Make a Fortune with This Place

Jurassic Park (1993) – Directed by Steven Spielberg – Starring Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough, Joseph Mazzello, Ariana Richards, Samuel L. Jackson, Bob Peck, Martin Ferrero, B.D. Wong, and Wayne Knight.

JURASSIC PARK is the quintessential summer blockbuster. Full of great characters, ideas, and story, it’s a highly quotable visual spectacle that leaves you on an emotional high. PARK is both easily consumable and incredibly satisfying.

My favorite scene in the film – and one of my favorite scenes in any film – comes when Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), and Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) first arrive on the island. Dr. John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) has picked them up at the copter landing spot and is wheeling them towards his big park’s HQ when they see their first dinosaurs. Spielberg masterfully builds to the moment, showing Grant’s eye-popping reaction shot, followed by Sattler’s eye-popping reaction shot, and then finally turning his camera around to show us a massive, magnificent Brachiosaurus eating from the top of a tree. John Williams’ score swells as the camera widens to show more and more dinosaurs moving around a pond. Grant and Sattler’s pure disbelief at what they’re experiencing when they see the dinos for the first time is like a grown up kid seeing everything they’ve always dreamed about in the flesh.

The beauty of this scene and the impact it has on Grant and Sattler always gets to me, and I always well up a bit at this moment. I was one of those kids who loved dinosaurs, who read everything I could about them, who endlessly imagined what it would be like to see one of them. The idea of dinosaurs walking the Earth again is, as an idea, an incredibly powerful one, and is, as an idea, something I wholly embrace.

Whether it’s an idea that should come to pass is, of course, the philosophical question at the heart of JURASSIC PARK.

Spielberg deftly weaves this question into the movie. Much like the Michael Crichton book the film is based on (Crichton gets a co-screenwriting credit alongside David Koepp), it’s Ian Malcolm who gets to pose the toughest questions about the existence of the enterprise, and Malcolm speaks in such a clipped, insightful manner that while his questions are profound, he doesn’t come across as pretentious. Well, okay, he does come off as pretentious, but disarmingly so; Malcolm is the kind of know-it-all jerk that you end up liking because he’s also just self-deprecating enough to make himself not only tolerable, but oddly likable.

Malcolm is completely in love with himself; his entire “rock star” persona is designed to front an image that he’s the coolest guy in the room, and he’s got the smarts to intellectually battle anyone who wants to challenge him.

Hammond has brought Grant, Sattler, and Malcom to his island because a worker was killed during a Velociraptor transporting accident. The island’s insurance company and its investors are worried enough that they know want experts to come in and sign off on the park. Company lawyer Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero) joins them, and to Hammond’s surprise it’s Gennaro who sides with Hammond and the three scientists who line up against him after they take a mini-tour and see the birth of a raptor in captivity. Malcolm’s disagreement is philosophical, as he doesn’t think Hammond has earned the power he now wields: “You stood on the shoulders of giants and took the next step.”

It’s a bit of a weak argument, as this is what scientists have been doing for ages. A far more compelling question is raised when he asks Hammond, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

While they don’t spend an inordinate amount of screen time together, Hammond and Grant are set up as dino-loving opposites. Both of the men love the idea of dinosaurs being back, but where Hammond plunges ahead to make that reality a possibility without full recognition or concern for the consequences, Grant sees the inherent danger (both philosophically and physically) in bringing extinct animals back to life.

Hammond urges them to hold off their final judgment until they take the tour, but as further proof that Hammond is just a big kid with a billionaire’s bank account, he thinks it’s a grand idea to invite his grandkids along for the tour. Lex and Tim (Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello) aren’t bad kids, but they’re kids, and Alan Grant doesn’t like kids. So, of course, the film is going to pair Grant with the kids.

Hammond piles the 3 scientists, 2 kids, and 1 laywer into decked-out Ford Explorers and sends them into the park proper. The first stop is the Dilophosaurus area, but they don’t show up. The next stop is the Tyrannosaur paddock, but she doesn’t show up, either. At this point everyone is starting to get frustrated. In the control room, Hammond and engineer Ray Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson) are busy monitoring everything in the park. Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight), the computer programmer, is around, too, being a general nuisance. Nedry is planning to steal the dinosaur DNA for a rival company.

Complicating everything (and excellently raising the level of tension in the film), is an approaching storm that has narly everyone working on the island exiting on a departing boat. The storm creates several positives for the film. First, it gets all of the non-essential (to the plot) characters off the island. Second, it raises the tension by creating a sense of foreboding before things go awry with the dinosaurs, and third, it creates one heck of a massive rain storm to make the first night’s action sequences even more dramatic.

Before that storm hits, however, we’ve got a really powerful scene with a sick Triceratops. Bored with the tour, everyone ends up piling out of the Explorers when they see the sick dino. Grant leads the way to the animal, and it’s a fantastic scene for several reasons. It gives us a one-to-one, physical interaction between man and dinosaur, which allows us to fully grasp how big these animals are as well as feel that they’re real creatures and not just beautiful CGI renderings. Like Grant, the Triceratops was always my favorite as a kid, too. The sequence also shows us the scientists in action, and narratively serves to split Sattler from Grant.

With Sattler sticking behind to help with the Triceratops, Grant, Malcolm, the kids, and the lawyer head back to the Explorers. On their way back to HQ, Nedry shuts the power off, which stalls the vehicles. While they’re waiting for the power to come back on, the Tyrannosaur shows up and gives us the film’s signature action sequence as the T-Rex takes on the two Explorers.

It is a magical sequence as the T-Rex sniffs and nudges and roars outside the kids’ Explorer. The kids are too scared to keep still, which gets the T-Rex to attack their Explorer to get at them, and forces Grant and Malcolm to get out of their Explorer to help. It’s as iconic a sequence as you’ll find in a popcorn flick, and every bit as good as Spielberg’s best and most iconic moments in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jaws.

By the end of this first encounter with the T-Rex, Gennaro is dead, Malcolm is severely injured, and Grant, Lex, and Tim have fled deeper into the park.

Kids can often be so annoying that they ruin a film like this with all their shrieking and wailing and stupidity, but Lex and Tim make fine additions to JURASSIC PARK, and provide a strong narrative arc for Grant. It’s a bit simplistic to think he can go from hating kids to loving kids over the course of a day running away from dinosaurs, but Spielberg doesn’t shove it in our faces. The growth comes naturally over the course of the film, and Lex and Tim prove capable of taking care of themselves.

The film is full of great action sequences beyond the initial T-Rex sequence: Nedry vs. the Dilophosaurus, Muldoon (Bob Peck) vs. the Velociraptors, the kids vs. the Velociraptors, and the T-Rex vs. the Velociraptors. There’s also some less violent moments, too, such as when Grant and the kids wind up in the middle of a Gallimimus stampede. All of the dinosaurs are gorgeous to look at and it’s somewhat surprising that 19 years after the film hit the theaters (God I’m getting old), the dinosaurs still look every bit as incredible as they first did. I bet I’ve listened to John Williams score to this film more than I’ve listened to his Star Wars score, as the main JURASSIC PARK theme is every bit as good as the Star Wars theme, but even more uplifting.

JURASSIC PARK is a magnificent movie, as close to cinematic perfection as you can get. Breathtaking, action-packed, funny, full of great characters, great music, and a simple, but satisfying horror story, JURASSIC PARK is one of the most-watched films in my collection. Every time I watch it I get sucked into it all over again. I’ve always loved dinosaurs but they’re special to my childhood more than my adulthood. Just the idea that there were these massive creatures roaming the Earth millions upon millions of years before humans was fascinating, as was the idea (as cheeky as it might sound now) that dinosaurs were nowhere in the Bible. Dinosaurs offered an alternative narrative of the history of the planet that we were learning at Sunday morning mass and in CCD classes. Loving them led to learning about them, and learning about them led to questions about God and church and the history of life itself. As a kid, of course, this manifests as the tried-and-true, “Why are there no dinosaurs in the Bible?” question, but not getting a satisfactory answer led to more questions and more questions and the idea that what I was being taught was perhaps not the truth.

But really, I liked dinosaurs because they were big and awesome and cool-looking, and more than anything else I’ve ever seen, JURASSIC PARK recaptures that sense of wonder.

________

JURASSIC PARK Review Index

JURASSIC PARK: We’re Gonna Make a Fortune with This Place
THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK: From Capitalist to Naturalist in Four Years
JURASSIC PARK III: This How You Play God