On The Adventures of Tintin
The Adventures of Tintin:
A Movie Review
by John David Ebert
When Michelangelo returned to the Sistine Chapel twenty years after finishing his Genesis masterpiece on the ceiling — a masterpiece which astonished everyone and caused Raphael to go back to his School of Athens to paint Michelangelo in as the morose Thinker in the foreground — he painted The Last Judgement on the wall behind the altar, and the resulting work ignited a storm of criticism about the painting’s Mannerist merits. It was generally conceded to be a recognizable masterpiece, but it was not received with anything like the warmth and enthusiasm of the ceiling fresco from twenty years earlier. Personally, I find it stiff, badly organized and full of awkwardly drawn figures and rather unimaginative depictions of the resurrection of the dead at the end of Time. But then, by 1534, Michelangelo was getting on in his years.
I feel a similar way about Steven Spielberg’s Adventures of Tintin. It is recognizably by the same hand who directed Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Indiana Jones movies many years ago, back in the 1980s — and the John Williams score even deliberately alludes to his earlier music for those films — but I am afraid that the spark has gone out of Spielberg’s fire, and it’s not something I’m sure he is ever going to get back again. It’s not a bad movie, by any stretch of the imagination, and it is certainly a better film than his recent Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls. But the story, which suffers from a complete lack of imagination, is filled with predictable set pieces and even whole scenes stolen from Raiders of the Lost Ark. I kept hoping for something fresh and new from this aging Hollywood master, but what I got instead was a collection of recycled images from his older films.
Part of the problem is that the ecology of Hollywood is no longer favorable for the taking of risks: movie theater attendance is at an all-time low due to competition from Netflix and the Internet generally, and as a result, Hollywood is only interested in putting out movies that are a “sure thing.” Hence, the current crop of miserable sequels like Mission Impossible IV and Men in Black III. Hollywood movies, in addition, have been petrifying for years into a fixed body of conventions and stock formulae that are reheated in one lousy movie after the next. And so, even an Old Master of the caliber of Spielberg is stuck working within the limits of a disintegrating studio system — a system which, back in the early 1970s, was suffering from a similar period of decline with the collapse of the old studio system which Lucas, Spielberg and the film school generation helped reinvent by bringing a totally fresh and utterly non-cynical approach to movie-making. For about the past decade or so, however, the Masters have stopped taking risks and instead, they have fallen back on making movies that attempt to capture a sense of nostalgia for the great days of their earlier work in the 1970s and 80s: hence, the Star Wars prequels, Avatar and Spielberg’s recent movies. Even War Horse, which I haven’t seen yet, looks like a rerun of Empire of the Sun.
In the final days of the work of Jackson Pollock, when he was losing his abilities as a great artist, he refused to simply continue making “Jackson Pollock paintings.” He had already done those with the drip paintings, and he kept trying to push on into fresh territory with new attempts like his black and white series, but nobody wanted them. And though his final attempts were largely failures, at least he refused to quit taking risks, and gave up only when he realized the risks just weren’t paying off, and either he would have to go back to making “Jackson Pollock paintings” or else hang it up as an artist. Few artists with any merit, faced with such a choice, would have continued living, either.
The Adventures of Tintin, I’m sorry to say, is precisely a “Steven Spielberg movie” that perpetuates his own formulas, cliches and conventions that he himself pioneered many years ago. Now he has become a prisoner of the very system that he helped to reform and the sad thing about Tintin is that he doesn’t even seem to by trying to escape from that prison, the way Pollock squirmed and writhed in his final days.
Maybe it’s the money. Having too much of it, as is well known, can create complacency and self-satisfied smugness that is a very difficult type of entropy to reverse. Civilizations, on a similar principle — Rome being the charismatic example — fall apart when they decide they’ve achieved all that they’re interested in achieving.
I suppose Tintin kept me entertained for two hours, but it never surprised me and it never tried to challenge my expectations for what a Spielberg movie should be all about. And even worse, the cardinal sin committed by the film is a lackluster climax with an abrupt ending that sets things up for the sequel, but leaves you walking away feeling cheated.
Spielberg is very possibly the most powerful man in Hollywood: unlike the other Old Masters, he is in a position in which he is not creatively compromised by a lack of funding and so, in theory anyway, he could make any movie about any subject he wanted. It’s too bad that he has to settle for repeating himself, instead of looking for fresh challenges and new material.
