The Secret of the Unicorn

I got to see the new Tintin movie tonight, which was brilliant. I've been looking forward to it since reading all about it last year in a magazine, what could be better than a Spielberg/Jackson collaboration, and yesterday a friend texted asking if I wanted to go along to an advanced screening. She'd been given four tickets as a promo thing for a local radio station. So after umming and ahhing I decided that it would be ok to leave my Granny's residence's Christmas do early and go and see it. And I wasn't disappointed.

Red Rackham's Treasure was one of my favourite Tintins when I was a kid (along with Tintin in America, The Land of the Black Gold... Oh all of them. Except the Shooting Star - that one I found a little boring). I was brought up on Tintin rather than Asterix, and they're still one of my fallback lunchtime reads. So I was pretty excited, and a little nervous about how this would go. Especially in 3D. But I wasn't disappointed. The characters were well created, made more human than in the comics, with smile wrinkles and wonky teeth, but still capturing the image of the books. The story had been expanded from the original, with little snippets of other books thrown in for good measure, but didn't go beyond the original plot. There were one or two action scenes that just lasted a little too long, but generally there was a great combination of Spielberg's Indiana Jones adventureness with Jackson's Bad Taste quirky oddness.

Most of all I was pleased with the 3D. I've not been sold on 3D, with uncomfortable glasses that make everything darker than ideal and reflect any lights shining behind you back in your eyes. That said I'd only seen it in Avatar and Tangled, and in both I felt it was a little gimicky, with feature scenes designed to sell you the marvel of the tech. In Avatar it was the special forest scenes, brushing through the soft wandy things, in Tangled it was the lanterns. But I saw Tangled at the movies in both 2D and 3D, and felt the 2D easily equally 3D, with beautiful depth and colour in all the scenes already. Tintin however treated 3D as a serious instrument. It didn't try to sell it to the audience, it didn't push it in our faces at key moments, it just used it as a fully fledged and grownup way of telling a story. Every scene was detailed and had fantastic depth, whether Tintin was walking through a French market, or Haddock was battling Rackham on the Unicorn. You didn't notice the 3D, and then you'd think about it, and you'd feel quite pleased about it.

So, the movie, a lot of fun, captured the sense of the comic while building on it. Didn't destroy my childhood images of all the characters, just developed them a little. Mature use of 3D, nice inclusion of unPCness, occasionally dragged a little. It opens in Australia on Boxing Day, and so my family might go to see it (as tradition dictates). I'll be telling them it's fun, it's an adventure, it's nothing deep (except the 3D), it's got some laughs, and so to see it.


And I was at this cinema, so here's those windows from another perspective.