The Adventures of Tin Tin: A Review

reminiscent of the sequences before a Bond movie and peopled by paper cut-outs. It introduces many of the main characters and themes before the beginning of the story.  Then open to a busy London market with blue skies and a gritty pavement, where a young man with a shock of bright orange hair is having his caricature done by a street artist. (The portrait is an exact likeness to the cartoon character of the past.) In this one glimpse we see a real person, not some digital grotesquery. This is part of what makes the movie great— where digital attempts at people in the past such as those in Beowulf and Polar Express come across as bad imitations of human beings, like reanimated corpses, jerky and grey skinned, Tin Tin does not try to fool us and instead makes use of fantasy status to do things that real people could not while still capturing all of the emotions of a real actor. While this was first achieved in James Cameron’s triumphant Avatar,  with ten foot tall blue people, that movie was derivative and mostly humorless, though no less grand. 

Soon the young Tin Tin (as voiced by Jamie Bell, King Kong; Jumper)is pulled into a mystery surrounding a model of the doomed tall ship, The Unicorn, and the treasure that it holds the key to, according to the family legend of the Haddocks. Our hero is captured and loaded onto a steamer headed to the Mediterranean, but little do the villains know that his trusty dog has stowed away as well, and means to rescue his master. As Tin Tin pulls off escape after wild escape, picking up the last, drunken remnant of the Haddock family on his way, and constantly searching for more coded maps, we are reminded inescapably of Indiana Jones. On his own Spielberg could have concocted this as a suspenseful and funny Raiders for kids, but luckily he was not on his own. Jackson brings to this movie an added since of scope and grandeur, when we see a busy Arabian street, we take the time to zoom along and inspect it, when there is a storm, it is a typhoon. The story is a classic treasure hunt, fairly predictable, very exciting, but the story is not the reason to watch Tin Tin. The look of the entire movie is flawless, gritty and comic, violent but silly. 

The final battle between the evil Sakharine (voiced by Daniel Craig, Quantum of Solace; Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) and the lovable drunkard Haddock (Andy Serkis, Lord of the Rings; King Kong) is ludicrous by ordinary terms— they spar with two loading cranes in a shipyard— but the realism of the scenery mixed with the characters’ flatness works. And in the end that is what rockets this movie past most adventure stories, these archetypal characters looking human enough to identify with and cartoon enough to survive a real world.

Emmet Temple wasn't forced into writing for Ocracoke Current. He volunteered in order to educate the masses.