Let it be known, that the Spielbergian adventure flick has not gone out of style. Three years after he stained his career image permanently with "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull", Spielberg puts out two films this year. One of them is the Oscar play, as much expected and maligned by myself. But to be perfectly honest, it's always been his more commercial plays that caught my attention, which is an ironic reversal of how things usually work. It's when he's not searching for meaning, and rather searching for thrills, that he strikes his strongest films, and also his weakest, but they are anything but banal. How is he the exception to the rule? An experience in cinema that is both his gift and his bane.
"The Adventures of Tintin" isn't an explosive return to greatness for Steven Spielberg, but it is a rollicking ride of a film. Based on the Herge comic series, the first film in Spielberg and Peter Jackson's co-operative film trilogy spends no immense amount of time establishing the Tintin character. From the first minute after the uppity animated opening, he's shown as eager, ambitious, and pretty much your zero qualms protagonist. Does he need to be a lot more? No, but we would damn sure like him to be. If Herge never gave him ample dimension, writers Steve Moffat, Edgar Wright, and Joe Cornish could have taken a bit of license with this one. But it's never really distracting, so there's that.
