With the arrival of “The Adventures of Tintin’’ in theaters today, another line has been drawn, that separating the past of the movies from their likely future. Produced by Peter Jackson and directed by Steven Spielberg (the two will swap hats for the 2013 sequel), the film marks the most convincing use yet of motion-capture technology, in which actors’ movements are translated into data and digitally “clothed’’ by computer graphics artisans. “Adventures’’ nominally stars Jamie Bell as the intrepid young journalist and Andy Serkis as his blustering friend Captain Haddock, but we never see the performers’ actual faces or bodies. Instead, photorealistic versions of Hergé’s beloved characters inhabit a bright, busy European Neverland.
Jackson’s wizards at Weta Digital have even solved — mostly — the dreaded “dead-eye syndrome’’ that plagued earlier motion-capture exercises like “The Polar Express.’’ The landscapes never feel less than hyper-real and the endless possibilities opened up by CGI mean that Spielberg can send his “camera’’ anywhere he wants for as long as he wants. In the movie’s unquestioned highlight — a jaw-dropping chase sequence through a multilevel Arab village — he does just that. Quite simply, “The Adventures of Tintin’’ is a model of modern movie craftsmanship.
It’s also, I’m afraid, rather dull.
The fault lies partly in Hergé’s narrative style, which works brilliantly in a comic book (or a movie serial) but in a feature film not so much. “Adventures’’ is essentially 1943’s “The Secret of the Unicorn’’ with a few nips and tucks: Tintin’s discovery of a coded treasure map in the mast of a ship model leads to a series of chases, kidnappings, fisticuffs, and hair-breadth escapes across Europe and the Arabian Peninsula. The hero’s accompanied by his faithful fox terrier, Snowy — the closest the “Tintin’’ books ever came to a love interest — and by Haddock, a comic blowhard whose fondness for whiskey is entertainingly out of step with our PC times.
