'Zero Dark Thirty', 'Lincoln', 'To The Wonder', 'Cloud Atlas': review round-up, plus Academy Award opinion

First up, before the reviews, a brief Academy Award summary just because it wouldn't be polite to completely ignore award season, as I have so far this year!

'Argo' winning doesn't offend me like it has some people. I know it's pretty lightweight, a sort of Sidney Lumet knock-off, but I really enjoyed it even if it's quite far from the best film of the past year (it made my 2012 top 30 though, coming in at 21). I think it found favour with the Academy because it's built to appease (or at least not offend) both right-wing hyper-patriots and liberals. It lays the blame for the situation in modern day Iran at the feet of the US - and UK - whilst also being a punch-the-air CIA success story, and in a part of the world where American successes are hard to come by. Plus, it's entertaining whilst still being kind of worthy, it pokes gentle fun of and celebrates Hollywood, and - though Ben Affleck was snubbed for a directorial nomination - the Academy traditionally loves actors behind the camera.

Ang Lee winning for the twee and shallow 'Life of Pi' (the night's big winner with 4 awards) is a joke, especially given that Paul Thomas Anderson ('The Master') and Terrence Malick ('To The Wonder') weren't even nominated. 'Life of Pi' was one of the worst films I saw last year. And how did it win a cinematography award? How much of it was actually filmed in-camera? It's a triumph of post-production work if anything at all - as a result (and perhaps justly) it won the visual effects award. I didn't rate 'Skyfall', but how is Roger Deakins still Oscar-less?

Can't argue with any of the acting wins, aside from the fact that Christoph Waltz ('Django Unchained') is clearly in the wrong category: he's a co-lead rather than a supporting player. Glad to see Jennifer Lawrence pick one up, though Bradley Cooper is the star performer in 'Silver Linings Playbook'. Would have taken any of Cooper, Jaoquin Phoenix ('The Master') or Daniel Day-Lewis for Best Actor, so I'm OK with the fact DDL won it - becoming the first triple Best Actor winner in the process. Pretty pleased for Anne Hathaway too: she's not in 'Les Miserables' for long, but she is the best bit. Besides she's due one for missing out back when she was up for 'Rachel Getting Married'. And, though I quite like Waltz and am glad he won another Oscar (just four years ago he was a 52 year-old unknown TV actor and now he has two Academy Awards!), there is no way his performance was on the same level as Philip Seymour Hoffman's career defining turn in 'The Master'. No way at all.

'Brave' shouldn't have beaten 'ParaNorman' in the animation category - or 'Wreck-It Ralph', for that matter. Confirmation that Pixar will win that award every year so long as the film in question isn't related to 'Cars'. I'd have preferred seeing 'A Royal Affair' win over 'Amour' in the foreign film category, but 'Amour' is still a terrific film. Shame Tarantino won a screenplay award for one of his baggiest movies: perpetuating the idea that the screenplay award is about dialogue, when movie writing is about much more than that. For instance, craft, structure and discipline. You shouldn't be able to throw every thought you've had onto a page and beat a pretty perfect film like 'Moonrise Kingdom' to that award. No arguments with 'Searching for Sugar Man' for best doc - loved it. Also, how was 'Cloud Atlas' (see opinion below) not even nominated for Best Make-Up? 'Hitchcock' was, and that's just Anthony Hopkins in a terrible fat-suit. 'Cloud Atlas' is a little more ambitious and interesting than that, even if it's not much else.

For more on the Academy Awards, they were the subject of my latest podcast with Toby King - which you can subscribe to on iTunes.

Anyway... reviews:

'Zero Dark Thirty' - Dir. Kathryn Bigelow (15)

Like 'The Hurt Locker' before it, Kathryn Bigelow's latest foray into post-9/11 US dealings in the Middle East is resolutely A-political. Whether that's in order to avoid splitting the audience (and Academy Award voters) or because she has no clear view on events I can't say, but 'Zero Dark Thirty' - despite strange allegations that it's pro-torture - is clinical, cold and matter of fact, sometimes to the point of being sterile. It's possibly the least testosterone-filled and adrenaline pumping movie of Bigelow's career as, aside from  a tense and deeply disturbing depiction of the Delta Force killing of Osama Bin Laden in the film's final third, it mainly follows the office-bound trials and tribulations of Jessica Chastain's maverick CIA operative. We witness her attempts - apparently based on fact - to persuade bosses to pro-actively pursue fresh intelligence on Bin Laden, then (supposedly) assumed by higher ups to be hiding in remote caves - a decade-long quest that ends in the al Qaeda leaders 2011 death.

The Delta Force sequence is breathtaking in its construction, and totally morally ambiguous - it's basically a group of well-armed men slaughtering the occupants of a family home as they sleep and plays as about as heroic as that sounds - but the rest is fairly forgettable, if reliably performed by the award-nominated lead. Chastain is a commanding presence, though most of her discussions with bosses are cliché dick-swinging contests won by the shoutiest person in the room, rather than Aaron Sorkin-style exhibitions of smartest-guy-in-the-room cleverness. It could have benefited from the latter given how talky it is, and how interesting much of supporting cast are: Mark Strong, Mark Duplass, Joel Edgerton, Chris Pratt, James Gandolfini, Kyle Chandler, Jason Clarke and Frank Grillo are all decent in it but have very little to do.

In regards to the much-discussed scenes of torture, I don't think Bigelow, or writer Mark Boal, has an overtly pro or negative stance (though you could certainly make a compelling case for anything other than a negative stance being morally dubious) as far as we can glean from the movie. Torture is certainly depicted, but ultimately generates no intelligence that isn't ultimately already in the CIA's possession. Besides, whilst the military personnel involved, along with Chastain's character, don't seem to have any problem with the practice, the torture itself is suitably uncomfortable to watch - much like the Delta Force raid. Neither are presented as performed by uncomplicated good guys. In fact I'd be very surprised if anybody - even on the extreme "kill them all for what they done" far-right - found much cause to celebrate the military action as depicted here. The film's only real crimes are against reasonable running times, as it out-stays its welcome by a good 40 minutes. But that's a consistent problem with 95% of recent movies. For further reading, see 'Lincoln' and 'Cloud Atlas' below.

'Lincoln' - Dir. Steven Spielberg (12A)

This will be a very short review, as Spielberg's 'Lincoln' is an otherwise forgettable (if robustly constructed) film that will be remembered for an amazing central performance: Daniel Day-Lewis is fantastic, as is much of an impressive supporting cast. His Abraham Lincoln is believable and a character, not a caricature - something that can't be said for every Day-Lewis creation. We have no real way of knowing if this is what the most-celebrated US president sounded like or moved like, but this portrayal is entirely convincing and, perhaps more significantly, wonderful to watch. In fact it's the only thing that kept me gripped in what's really a dry courtroom drama about the horse-trading and back-room politics involved in passing a law. The Civil War setting is interesting and the law in question - the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which outlawed slavery in the United States - is obviously of great historical importance, but Spielberg's telling of these events suffers from an uncharacteristic lack of dynamism and narrative drive.

'To The Wonder' - Terrence Malick (12A)

Full disclosure: I'm not a great lover of Terrence Malick's ouvre, finding that I appreciate his work far more than I enjoy it or even like it. In that respect 'To The Wonder' is true to form: a plot-light, narration-heavy visual poem, replete with awe-inspiring visuals (including the classic: long grass in a suburban American backyard at magic hour) and deeply, earnestly contemplative about the meaning of existence, the director's relationship with God and our place in the universe. This one deals in typically big themes via Javier Bardem's conflicted priest and Olga Kurylenko's lovelorn immigrant - covering existential despair with over the top free-spirited joie de vivre. Yet it's more satisfying for me as a subject for post-film conversation than as a viewing experience itself.

To me its whispering narration, mostly in French and Spanish this time around, coupled with inspirational visuals of people frolicking in nature, give it the feeling of a particularly lavish perfume ad or an especially bombastic mobile phone commercial. Which isn't to say the film itself is at all superficial or pretentious: I think Malick is entirely sincere and honest in what feels like a very personal exploration of - among other things - marriage as an intrinsic part of faith and faith as an essential component of marriage. It's just that, as with the similar (if infinitely more grand and ambitious) 'Tree of Life', the themes that are closest to Malick's heart couldn't be further from my own. Spirituality and faith are often no more than buzzwords in American movies, and Malick is to be applauded for examining these concepts seriously and devoid of superficiality (I'm thinking of you 'Life of Pi'), but they don't particularly interest me as a militant atheist.

On a different tact, Ben Affleck is completely bland (or perhaps his character is just incredibly cold to the point that he isn't required to express any emotion) and his character poorly defined, whilst Rachel McAdams is in it for barely ten minutes - making it odd that in some cases the marketing has billed them as the stars, especially given that Kurylenko narrates the majority of the piece and features more prominently from start to finish. In many respects the film is about her character's journey from flighty and infatuated love-obsessive to wounded and disheartened romance cynic.

'Cloud Atlas' - Dir. Tom Tykwer, Lana Wachowski & Andy Wachowski (15)

Nothing says the Wachowskis like ambitious and expensive folly, and so in the spirit of the 'Matrix' sequels and the unfairly maligned 'Speed Racer' comes the cluttered and confused 'Cloud Atlas', made in collaboration with German filmmaker Tom Tykwer (of 'Run Lola Run' and 'The International' fame). There's so much to be curious about here: for instance, the principal stars all play a half-dozen different characters, often changing race and gender as the film cuts between time periods - from the 1800s to the far-flung, post-apocalyptic future. It's a sci-fi blockbuster, romantic tragedy, period drama, espionage thriller and a slapstick comedy about bungling pensioners - all in one movie. But this is both the appeal and, it turns out, the problem. Many (if not all) of these disparate elements are interesting, but combined they have the effect of drowning each other out, whilst the constant cutting leaves it feeling messy and unfocussed.

Basically it doesn't quite work as a whole, only really succeeding as a curiosity: but, for many, this curiosity won't extend for the film's near three-hour running time. Furthermore, the stories only really have one point: that we should set aside intolerance of difference and embrace the fact that we are all essentially one single race, united in our struggles. That's why it is actually anti-racist for (as an example) Jim Sturgess to get made up to look Korean, as opposed to deeply troubling: because the fact that we're all the same is the movie's entire point - which it attempts to amplify through the repeated use of the same actors in vastly different role across the span of human existence. But this presents two problems, as I see it.

The first is that this message, if - like most of the audience, I presume - you already believe it, doesn't require a three-hour, $100 million demonstration in which Tom Hanks incongruously plays an Irishman, a Scotsman and a futuristic caveman. The second difficulty is that, by venturing into the bigoted sci-fi future, and the bigoted ultra-distant future, the film suggests that this war against difference is intrinsic to the human experience and never destined to change. In other words: we'll always be racists. And that's a bit pessimistic for my taste.

Mass Effect 3 endings: Questions better than answers?

As I explained in my last post, I've not really done anything film related over the past week due to the release of Mass Effect 3 - a sci-fi video game which concludes an epic trilogy which started in 2007 and has taken me (something like) a combined 100+ hours to complete. I've finished it now and, in lieu of anything filmy to talk about, I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on it here. Well, not so much on the game itself: mostly I wanted to talk about the furore surrounding the game's controversial ending.

I won't explain in any depth why the ending(s) is so controversial. After all, two smart chaps at Game Front have already done that over two incredibly comprehensive pieces in the last few days (see HERE and HERE), and whilst I don't agree with all of their points, they certainly make a very good case for the idea that the story's climax is - at the very best - flawed. (Though, for what it's worth, I think they overstate the amount of genuine "choice" and "freedom" present over the rest of the trilogy, with player choices always simplistic, binary and of little meaningful consequence even before this supremely botched conclusion. For instance the decision of whether to sacrifice Kaiden or Ashley in the closing hours of the first game was completely superficial, seeing as how both characters go on to perform the exact same role, speak the same dialogue, and make the same decisions.)

Anyway, the reason I bring this up on my film blog is that their main gripe ties into something I've wondered about for a long time, concerning whether it is better for a narrative to conclude with questions or answers. Director Terry Gilliam's passionate avocation of the innate superiority of the former has long been an influence on me. Here he explains (correctly) why Spielberg is less good/interesting than Kubrick, but much more popular:



In what can only be perceived as a slap in the face of Gilliam, a complaint the writers of these Mass Effect articles make - and one which is echoed in the substantial comments threads below both pieces - is that the story needed a solid resolution. The ending, the logic runs, is too open to interpretation and raises more questions than answers and this is a very bad thing indeed. In fact it's worse than that: it's an insult to gamers (etc etc etc). One of the writers, Phil Hornshaw, has even responded to several passionate comments below his piece, in each case (tellingly) choosing to reiterate that the success of the ending as it stands is "contingent on BioWare providing more ending content through [downloadable content]". In other words: the unresolved ending is only worth a damn if we're eventually going to get answers, and soon dammit.

This feeling of indignation is so vehement that a fan-led campaign called Retake Mass Effect has quickly raised over $50,000 for charity as it attempts to coerce developers BioWare into releasing an alternate ending. Their stated aims, as listed on their site, are very telling (underlining my own):

We believe:
* That it is the right of the writers and developers of the Mass Effect series to end that series however they see fit
However, we also believe that the currently available endings to the series:
* Do not provide the wide range of possible outcomes that we have come to expect from a Mass Effect game
* Do not provide a sense of succeeding against impossible odds
* Do not provide a sense of closure with regard to the universe and characters we have become attached to
* Do not provide an explanation of events up to the ending which maintains consistency with the overall story
We therefore respectfully request additional endings be added to the game which provide:
* A more complete explanation of the story events
* An explaination of the outcome of the decisions made, especially with regard to the planets, races, and companions detailed throughout the series
* A heroic ending which provides a better sense of accomplishment

Perhaps never has there been greater proof of what Gilliam is saying in the sense of what is popular: people clearly desire answers and a feeling of "success". There have been a lot of fans scrambling to make sense of the ending and vent their frustration at what BioWare have done, but the only voices (I have encountered) who seem to be defending the openness Gilliam-style are the developers themselves, who have come out admitting that they removed explanation from the final scenes believing it made the ending weaker and less memorable. They have admitted knowingly devising a "polarising" end to their story so as to generate (as Gilliam so relishes) a dialogue.

"Are video games art?" is that nebulous, maddening discussion that won't ever die. I come down, roughly, on the side that they probably are - but even I admit that the debate surrounding this issue is profoundly pointless. However, if the game's audience can not appreciate what might be termed a "Kubrickian" ending, then what does that say about the way games are consumed as a medium? Perhaps nothing at all. After all, Mass Effect is a blockbuster and a similar response might have been expected had, say, 'Transformers 3' ended as obliquely.

In any case, I guess what I'm getting at is this: I too was underwhelmed by the game's ending. I can understand first hand the desire to have closure on the story and to know the subsequent fates of characters who had (in a sad and strange way familiar to all RPG gamers) become my friends. Yet this massive fan outcry in favour of "answers" misses the point. It isn't bad that Mass Effect ends on questions - I'm still with Gilliam on that score - rather, it's that the questions is raises ("is Shepard alive?", "did he defeat the Reapers?", "what did his crew do next?") are so uninteresting and narrowly focused.: too embedded in the game's internal mythology, rather than any grander existential concerns. '2001: A Space Odyssey' Mass Effect is not. But I'm inclined to say nice try for not taking the easiest path, so far at least.

It remains to be seen whether BioWare chicken out and give the people what they want, as Spielberg infamously did in his cinematic re-release of 'Close Encounters', which took viewers inside the otherwise mysterious alien spaceship. Money talks, so I have a hunch they will. And I'll probably buy it too. I don't know what to think.

'War Horse' review:

I fundamentally don't care whether a wide-eyed village simpleton (Jeremy Irvine) finds his 'orse. Especially not amongst the horror of the First World War. And yet here is 'War Horse': a film that time and time again asks the audience to put the fate of the titular steed, Joey, above that of the on-screen humans. Upon hearing of a man's death in battle via letter, Irvine's farm boy hero is only moved to say "he was riding Joey when he died" - fearing for the horse and instantly disregarding the man. At the height of the idiocy, a doctor is asked to leave a makeshift hospital full of dying soldiers to tend to Joey. Who bloody cares about this horse?!

Apparently everyone, for in this story Joey touches the lives of several different people, on different sides of the conflict, heralding chaos, death and misery wherever he goes. As based on the acclaimed Michael Morpurgo novel-turned-stage play, it's supposed to be the story of man's inhumanity to man seen through the eyes of an innocent animal. Yet Steven Spielberg's overwrought and overlong melodrama (as penned by the apocalypse signifying double-act of Richard Curtis and Lee Hall) makes it feel as though he's somehow the cause of all these problems rather than an observer - with more than one owner facing death or ruin before 146 laboured minutes are done.

Unless you automatically gawp and coo at the merest sight of an animal, you won't give the slightest toss what happens here. The human characters, with little screen-time to speak of, are painted as the thinnest caricatures: Benedict Cumberbatch as the shouty, plummy officer, Tom Hiddleston as a softly-spoken, well-meaning aristo, Emily Mortimer as the put upon farmer's wife, Peter Mullan as the drunken old farmer and so on. Though they all make a decent show of it - particularly the increasingly ubiquitous Cumberbatch.

Tonally it's all over the map too, shifting between the most wholesome Hovis advert never made and gritty, 'Saving Private Ryan' style battle sequences in which people crawl through mud crying and riddled with bullets. To give you some idea of what a mess it is, here are four isolated scenes listed in chronological order: some comedy business with a wacky goose; an artful shot of two children being executed; a short sequence in which a cute French girl tries to teach Joey how to jump; the battle of the Somme.

The increasingly self-parodic John Williams relentlessly underpins all this with his most cloying score to date, leading to an extraordinary disconnect between what's being depicted (usually a handsome horse running) and what we are obviously supposed to feel. The worst thing though is that Spielberg is just not built to tell a story about moral equivalence, the futility of war and the commonality of all men. He needs to create baddies and sell us goodies we can cheer for. The result is that the worst war time atrocities are shown committed by the German army whilst Joey is in their care - with a commander who smokes a cigar and might as well laugh maniacally at the end of every sentence.

A decent early action scene manages to convey both the historic potency of the cavalry charge and its obsolescence in 20th Century warfare within an expertly staged five minutes. But the film's best sequence sees a German and British soldier meet in no man's land in a mutual effort to free Joey from some barbed wire: they joke together and end the encounter wishing each other well. This is what the heart of the material is supposed to be about but it's not what Spielberg has been gearing us up for. Under his direction this is reduced to the story of a "magnificent kind of horse" and makes for the purest kind of hogwash.

'War Horse' is out now in the UK, rated '12A' by the BBFC.

'Real Steel' review:

It doesn't matter who is promoting 'Real Steel', whether it's charismatic leading man Hugh Jackman, over-enthusiastic director Shawn Levy or an anonymous automaton of the PR machine, the message about the family robot boxing movie is consistent: "it's not about the robots" they say, "it's a father and son story." This is the standard line for almost any special effects led movie, so I didn't take it all that seriously going in. After all, 'Real Steel' is set in an improbable future in which the world's most popular spot is effectively 'Robot Wars', as machines battle it out in the boxing ring in place of flesh and blood humans. But it turns out, for better or worse, they were all telling the truth. Even if the film begins with a giant robot punching an animal in the face for entertainment in front of a family crowd (an act never scrutinised), it is a father and son bonding movie first and an underdog boxing movie (with fighting robots) second.

Jackman plays a former boxer who never got to fulfil his potential because of all the worldwide robo-love. As a result he's now a jaded robot boxing trainer: down on his luck, owing a lot of money to a lot of people and sort of into Evangeline Lilly's gym owner (though this is never explored). Additionally, he's brash, cocky and arrogant. We meet him on the run from his latest humiliating defeat, as he's told that an ex-girlfriend from more than a decade ago has just died, leaving him in custody of his son (Dakota Goyo) - who he has never met and has less than no interest in. So, being an upstanding citizen, he sells the boy to his wealthy aunt for $50, 000 in order to buy a new fighting robot (this actually happens). But there is a snag as said aunt wants to go on holiday abroad (she seemingly isn't too upset about the death of her sister and - to be honest - neither is the boy, who gets stuck into building robots within minutes), leaving Jackman looking after the kid on a temporary basis.



It's nice to see an entry into the Spielbergian "absent father" sub-genre in which the dad is actually allowed to be a total prick, as opposed to committing the sin of having to go to work rather than play pirates all day (as in 'Hook'). Jackman sells this dickishness with commitment, bravely jettisoning a sizable amount of his inherent likeability for the first half of the movie. As the boy, Goyo is also pretty good (though his haircut and propensity to fix robots makes him distractingly similar to a young Anakin Skywalker), whilst Lilly (of 'Lost' fame) makes a good fit as the best friend/love interest/potential surrogate mother figure. It helps that the robots themselves are well designed too: the upshot being that you can always tell them apart during the fights and they seem to suggest an amount of personality - both attributes lacking in the 'Transformers' movies.

It's also colourful and - with the exception of an unnecessary "payback" moment late on - mostly good-natured, which I guess is the least that could be expected from a director whose filmography is comprised of bland comedies (remakes of 'The Pink Pather' and 'Cheaper by the Dozen', as well as 'Big Fat Liar' and the 'Night at the Museum' movies). But as restless young legs knocked the back of my seat it was clear something wasn't working. You see, there isn't much robo-boxing and some of the kids in the showing I attended clearly didn't care about any of the bits in between. One child loudly summed up the general mood at regular intervals, and in doing so became the afternoon's highlight, shouting "dad, this is rubbish", followed later by "I want to go home!" and "yay! it's finished". The atmosphere generated by these discontented youngsters was curiously counter-productive to the movie's family message, as the dads kept their thankless offspring prisoner in the cinema. Ignoring for a moment the fact that the action scenes (two robots hitting each other) are inherently boring anyway, the slowness of the dominant father and son story is truly crushing.



Some of it's laughable too, but not just with the trademark Levy humour (funny accents, lots of falling over) but with some calculated sub-Bieber dance routines, as the kid engages in bouts of "street" body popping with his best buddy robot, and one cheese-loaded sequence in which the boy goes for a run with the machine and makes it give him a big hug (awww!). The tone is uneven, shifting uneasily between gentle, understated moments of the father and son on the road (in the beautiful rural south of the US) and a sort of '8 Mile' attitude at the "underground" robot fights (why on earth would robot boxing have an underground? What is the difference?). It also doesn't help that the film's message is confused: Jackman personally controls his robot by shadow boxing whereas their major league rival is controlled by a less romantic array of men at computers, with the implication being that battle robots/computers/action scenes are souless and no substitute for human characters - a point undermined, not only by the premise of the film, but by a vague suggestion that the scrappy good guy robot (our plucky, low-tech underdog) has something like a soul.

'Real Steel' isn't a good movie and, to be brutally honest, I've been kinder here than was my first impulse on leaving the screen. But in genuinely trying to give the human story some heft, rather than viewing it as an inconvenience between robot fights, the film deserves some small credit. It might not do angsty drama particularly well, but it's a move in the right direction: in 2011 a family movie with punching robots that isn't full of masturbation jokes, women in hot pants bending over motorcycles and regressive ethnic stereotypes doesn't deserve to be torn to shreds and actually seems strangely quaint.

'Real Steel' has been on general release in the UK and is rated '12A' by the BBFC.

'The Adventures of Tintin' review:

In the popular imagination Steven Spielberg was once a name that stood for high-class family friendly adventure, with the Hollywood powerhouse having helped to redefine the modern spectacle-led blockbuster in the 1980s: directing the iconic likes of 'E.T.' and the 'Indiana Jones' trilogy, whilst producing 'The Goonies', 'Gremlins' and 'Back to the Future'. Yet in 1993 everything seemed to change for the filmmaker who suddenly "went serious". He'd always had a wider ranging filmography than he's given credit (including films as diverse as farcical comedy '1941', TV-made horror 'Duel', David Lean-style epic 'Empire of the Sun' and the romantic drama 'Always'), but snaring the Best Director statuette at the Academy Awards that year - for the black and white and grimly serious 'Schindler's List' - seems to have provoked an almost wholesale abandonment of the superior family fare that was his particular genius.

Aside from two poorly received sequels - 1997's 'Jurassic Park: The Lost World' and 2008's 'Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull' - the years since his austere holocaust epic have yielded well-meaning slavery drama 'Amistad', sentimental WWII drama 'Saving Private Ryan', forgettable Israeli vengeance thriller 'Munich' and the melancholy, Kubrick-devised 'AI: Artificial Intelligence'. Even his returns to comparatively light material have been more adult-focussed than his reputation might once have suggested, with the Tom Hanks comedies 'Catch Me If You Can' and 'The Terminal' and Tom Cruise sci-fi movies 'Minority Report' and 'War of the Worlds'. Even his output as a producer has become more cynical and less winsomely old fashioned, as best displayed by the putrid, morally/creatively bankrupt 'Transformers' movies and the humourless, overblown 'Cowboys and Aliens'.

Yet even as he readies the "worthy" award bait 'War Horse' for release just in time for back-slapping season, this year Spielberg makes a welcome return to his old stomping ground: bidding to entertain children worldwide all over again with an animated adaptation of 'The Adventures of Tintin'. Whilst he's long held an interest in animation - producing the fondly remembered Don Bluth films of the 80s ('An American Tale' and 'The Land Before Time') and several terrific 90s TV series (including 'Tiny Toon Adventures' and 'Animaniacs') - this comic book adaptation marks his debut directorial effort in the medium (as well as in 3D), and has seen him work closely in collaboration with fellow live action specialist Peter Jackson - the planned director of the film's sequel, should it perform as expected at the box office this winter.



'Tintin' finds its director in playful mood, subtly referencing some of his earlier films with neat visual touches, and it's no surprise if the film feels as though it's channelling a younger Spielberg. After all, his adaptation of this material has had a long gestation period, beginning with the acquisition of the film rights as early as 1984 - a year after the death of the books' author Hergé, who named the American as the material's ideal director. Over the years it's been touted as a live action film (the original concept would have seen Jack Nicholson as alcoholic Scott Captain Haddock) before finally winding up a dazzling example of motion capture, courtesy of Jackson's New Zealand effects outfit WETA. Drawing material largely from the books 'The Crab With the Golden Claws', 'The Secret of the Unicorn', 'Red Rackham's Treasure' and - unexpectedly - 'The Castafiore Emerald', the adaptation sees intrepid reporter Tintin (Jamie Bell) and his faithful dog Snowy trying to discover the significance of a small model ship stolen from by the mysterious aristocrat Sakharine (Daniel Craig).

Sakharine (a red herring non-villain in the original) is hoping to uncover some legendary pirate booty, whilst also settling a score with the oblivious, self-pitying drunkard Captain Haddock (mo-cap veteran Andy Serkis), whose ship he has stolen. This inter-generational feud plot-line is in an invention of British screenwriters Steven Moffat, Joe Cornish and Edgar Wright which serves to give a scrapbook array of original elements something of a dramatic through-line and a clear baddie. It's a change that will drive die-hard Tintin fans nuts, but it's a smart move from a narrative point of view. That the grudge match is resolved in a credibility stretching battle between two cargo cranes (staged as a colossal sword fight) is a pity, but the idea itself is compelling.

On the whole the changes are on a smaller scale and relate to the order of events rather than the spirit of Hergé's books. The characters are photo-realistic renderings in the artist's own distinctive style of caricature, which are stylised enough to avoid the ugly, unsettling "uncanny valley" effect felt strongly in the recent Robert Zemeckis animations (such as 'Beowulf') and characters, like the bumbling British detectives Thomson and Thompson (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost), are portrayed faithfully. As the titular hero Bell acquits himself well, portraying him as a capable young adult where so many other adaptations over the years (notably the rubbish French-Canadian animated series) cast him as irritatingly boyish. Snowy is also deployed well - an effective aid to his master and an equally effective excuse for lengthy spoken exposition (in this respect Snowy is the original Chewbacca/R2-D2).



The stand-out bit of action is an extended flashback as Haddock enthusiastically relives an encounter between his 17th century ancestor Sir Francis Haddock and a pirate ship on the high seas. The jaw-dropping and inventive choreography of this sequence is much more high-octane than its source equivalent and - as some would have it - marks a departure from Hergé's more grounded and meticulously researched world. Though coming via Haddock's drunken storytelling and delivered with a great sense of fun, the filmmakers come away credibility intact.

Tintin is apparently virtually unknown in the US, so Spielberg might (with some justification) have sought to Americanise this very European series in the course of adapting it. However fans will be pleased to learn that the story begins in a timeless (non-specific early twentieth century) Europe, with Tommy guns and classic cars (Tintin doesn't have an iPhone 4) and exclusively features actors with quintessentially "old world" accents. The tone of this adventure varies between brightly coloured 'Indiana Jones' style Saturday matinee action, broad pratfalls and the oppressive mood of film noir, with this blend meshing comfortably. It's also the most gutsy children's film in a while and doesn't talk down to its young audience (note the irksome, charmless 'Happy Feet Two' was trailed beforehand as if to highlight the current low standard of kids movies). For instance, Tintin wields a gun - a surprise considering the director infamously replaced guns with walkie-talkies digitally in his "20th Anniversary Edition" of 'E.T.' - and Haddock slurps whiskey like there's no tomorrow.

It's fair to say that there are too many frantic chase sequences and the film feels a tad long, but overall Spielberg and Jackson's take on the material is respectful and makes for suitably exciting viewing. It is easily the most unashamedly fun Spielberg has been since 'Jurassic Park' almost two decades ago and, though I suspect it's going to prove an interesting sidestep rather than a sign of things to come, I'm very glad he's snuck in this elaborate caveat ahead of the inevitably yawnsome 'War Horse'. A film which may well win him another Oscar and confirm my suspicion that - in terms of award recognition - it's better to be a passable dramatist than a world class showman. How different things might have been if he'd received Academy recognition for 'E.T.' At least we have 'The Adventures of Tintin'.

'The Adventures of Tintin' is released in the UK from tomorrow (October 26th) and has been rated 'PG' by the BBFC.