The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (USA, 2011)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Starring Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg

Because of the high regard in which Tintin is held around the world, it's fair to assume that any film adaptation would fall short of the mark in some way, shape or form. For all the charm and appeal of past adaptations, in film, TV and on the stage, none of them have truly captured the magic and intrigue of Hergé's iconic hero. With this in mind, Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson have delivered a film of real brio and excitement which, while by no means definitive, is definitely worth your time.While the marriage between Spielberg directing and Jackson producing seems like a match made in heaven, both have been guilty recently of falling short of the mark - Spielberg with the unremarkable Indy 4, and Jackson with his misjudged take on The Lovely Bones. Likewise, it is not safe to assume that their combined affection for the source material will translate into a brilliant adaptation. Tim Burton has long professed his love for Alice in Wonderland, but when he finally got the chance to express said love, he came a cropper.Fittingly enough, the film begins with some Burton-esque opening credits, in which we are gradually introduced to the Tintin universe while the various names fly past. The opening animation gleefully replicates the feel of the comics, drawing on the plot of The Seven Crystal Balls and capturing every detail, right down to the drawn-on gasps. It has the same playful feel as the Pink Panther opening credits, and goes some way to both setting the scene and reassuring the fans that they are in safe hands.It is also a relief that Spielberg and Jackson's big creative decision quickly pays off (and no, I don't mean the 3D). The Adventures of Tintin was shot entirely in motion capture, with post-production taking nearly a year to accurately re-create the comics. The technology as employed here is the best it's ever been at capturing people: it is incredibly photorealistic but lacks the eerie, dead-eyed quality of Robert Zemeckis' efforts. As a side point, digital animation has a habit of making characters seem ballooned and bloated, which suits Haddock and the two detectives rather well.When War of the Worlds was released in 2005, Terry Gilliam remarked that Spielberg was a man who "makes brilliant scenes but can't make a movie anymore." Regardless of one's views on War of the Worlds (it's better than the original), it is undoubtedly true that the highlights of Tintin are the set-pieces. Of course, set-pieces in and of themselves do not make for a gripping piece of narrative. But to dismiss Spielberg and Jackson's expertise in this area is to do both of them a great disservice.The set-pieces in The Adventures of Tintin are consistently inventive and exciting. The pirate battle, which is told by Haddock in flashback, finds two ships getting locked by their masts at right angles during a storm; people are running up and down the various riggings with fire, water and gunfire all around them. It kicks all four Pirates of the Caribbean films into a cocked three-cornered hat, and reminds you of the classic pirate and swashbuckling films of old-school Hollywood.Equally spectacular is the city chase, in which the three scrolls containing the location of the treasure change hands on multiple occasions. During this ten-minute sequence, Tintin and Haddock chase the bad guys in a jeep, one of whom has a hawk carrying the scrolls. At one point Tintin's bike breaks in half and he uses the front-wheel as a zipwire to slide down a telegraph line and capture the scrolls. In another moment, he is literally hanging onto the hawk as it fights to stay in the air. While all this is going on, a tank careers into a hotel and starts rolling down a street with the hotel attached. It finally comes to a halt right on the sea front, and the owner comes out and adds another star to its rating - a witty pay-off that could only have come from the man who gave us Indiana Jones.Set-pieces like this are thrillingly executed, and leave the ten-year-old boy in me screaming "Wow!". But there is a side-effect to all the comparisons with Indy. The more the similarities keep stacking up, the more you wish that Spielberg could have gone back and simply filmed them for real. Most of the stunts I have listed would have looked amazing in real life and could be achieved without much in the way of CGI. Seeing it animated, especially in motion capture, deprives us of that raw physical thrill that we got from Indy, so that while the film as a whole is more exciting than Indy 4, it's a lot less endearing than the original trilogy.And it's not just Indy that Spielberg is tipping his fedora to in this film. There are multiple big references to Jaws: the first comes in the shark falling from the ceiling on board the ship, and the second with Tintin's quiff bobbing above water like a shark's fin as he sneaks up on the plane he downed with a pistol. References like this produce knowing laughs and are in a sense reassuring: we are definitely getting Spielberg in proper popcorn mode, whether by choice or through Jackson's gentle persuasion.More problematic than the Indy resemblances is the story itself. The film combines the narratives of three of the books - The Secret of the Unicorn, Red Rackham's Treasure and The Crab with the Golden Claws. There is some reasoning behind this, since many of the Tintin stories are quite short and self-contained. This is one reason why the series worked up to a point on TV and especially well on radio (regardless of Andy Serkis' best efforts, Leo McKern remains the definitive Haddock).Despite the assured writing talents of Edgar Wright and Steven Moffatt, The Adventures of Tintin's story is decidedly stodgy. It takes a good twenty minutes for the film to get into gear, not from adjusting to the visuals but from getting used to the massively expository tone. Combining three stories together means that plot points are merged and mashed together awkwardly, causing us to miss out on great moments and characters. There is no room for Professor Calculus, Max Bird or the sunken submarine. Leaving out the latter makes us question why it wasn't enough to do Unicorn and Rackham together, turning a two-part story into 90 minutes.The supporting characters in the film are enjoyable but all a little slim. Thomson and Thompson (Nick Frost and Simon Pegg) are quite funny in all their little scenes, but their limited role in the search for treasure leaves us wondering why they keep turning up at all. Bianca Castafiore, the opera singer whom Haddock despises, only turns up very briefly, and the film almost misses the big gag that she can't actually sing. Worst of all is Snowy: while physically expressive, he doesn't get to 'talk' or impart much of his inner thoughts to the audience. In the absence of a 'talking' Snowy, you need a stronger third character, like Professor Calculus, to complete the triangle.There seems to be a trend in modern screenwriting to take a sideways view at stories which are good and hardy enough to be told straight. Even if Disney had been constantly sanitising his vision, Burton's Alice in Wonderland would have been a much better film if it had told the story as it has always been enjoyed. While there is no such possible contempt shown for Hergé, it is something that should be borne in mind for when Jackson comes to direct the sequel.The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is a decent and enjoyable romp, at least when viewed in 2D. Neither Spielberg or Jackson are firing on all cylinders - though the latter's involvement with The Hobbit is as good an excuse as you need. But that said it is more enjoyable than Indy 4, and perhaps the closest that Spielberg has come to matching the spirit of Indy in the last ten years of his career. In the end it's flawed but good fun, and it will be interesting to see where things go from here.

Rating:
Verdict: Spectacular but narratively stodgy

Carrie (USA, 1976)
Directed by Brian De Palma
Starring Sissy Spacek, Amy Irving, Piper Laurie, Nancy Allen

Like Jaws a year before it, Carrie is one of the great happy accidents in horror cinema. Stephen King almost threw away his debut novel out of artistic frustration, and was only paid $2,500 for the film rights. The production was underfunded by United Artists and its director, Brian De Palma, lacked commercial viability, having had only a modest hit with Obsession. But out of this potential disappointment came an engrossing and terrifying film, one of the best Stephen King adaptations and perhaps the high point of De Palma's career.Like a lot of Stephen King adaptations, there was a relatively small gap between Carrie being published as a novel and the film version being released. The only contemporary production with a shorter turnaround was Christine, which went from a novel in April 1983 to being filmed by John Carpenter that same summer and being released in December. Hence it is difficult to judge how much of the film's success lies in De Palma's direction and how much of it lies in the source material.De Palma's biggest contribution, from a narrative point of view, is to take such a relatively simple premise - a high-school girl with telekinetic powers - and explore it over 90 minutes with precious little in the way of padding. Because Carrie was originally intended as a short story, it has an inbuilt modesty which is absent from It or The Shining. But what it lacks in epic storytelling it, more than makes up for in its thematic depth and the intense believability of its characters.Carrie at its most basic is about the horrors of high school: the bullying, the peer pressure, the feeling of being an outcast and, in an exaggerated way, having to live up to the expectations of one's parents. Its influence can clearly be seen in everything from Michael Lehmann's cult classic Heathers to more mainstream efforts like Mean Girls. The opening sequence in the showers sets up the majority of the girls as school as utterly repulsive. Their rapid-fire, everybody-talks-at-once dialogue is obnoxious for all the right reasons, and their posing, pulchritudinous bodies are in stark contrast to Carrie, who is so gaunt and wiry that you might mistake her for Gollum.Within this context, Carrie's telekinesis represents her burgeoning adolescent rage. It begins as something over which she has very little control, but over the course of the film she learns to focus it and use it sparingly. The film uses telekinesis in the same way that Let The Right One In uses vampirism, as a means of expressing a deep emotional reaction to the world by placing it outside of oneself. But as with the final scenes in Let The Right One In, Carrie's abilities are not entirely within her grasp, and at the prom there is still a question of whether she is controlling her powers or the other way around.Carrie is also about the suffocating influence of religion, and in particular its role in the repression and persecution of women. Carrie's mother is a Christian fundamentalist who believes that menstrual bleeding is an indication of sin. When punishing Carrie she continually recites the phrase "Eve was weak" and forces her daughter to repeat it, to confess to a crime that she has committed simply by being born a woman.The mother, played with abandon by Piper Laurie, is essentially a sadomasochistic character. She derives pleasure in the form of spiritual vindication from both inflicting pain on Carrie and by condemning herself. By believing that all women are cursed and sinful, she is submitting herself and her daughter to a greater will, allowing herself to be punished both alongside her daughter and on her behalf. The deep bond between mother and daughter is paralleled by the bond between sex and spirituality. The mother's gasps as she dies are borderline orgasmic, and she dies in the same pose as the icon of Christ in Carrie's closet.The Biblical connotations of Carrie are not confined to the position of women. Carrie's bleeding is interpreted as not just punishment for her own sins, but for the sins of her mother and father. Towards the end of the film, it is revealed that Margaret White slept with Carrie's father outside of wedlock, the implication being that Carrie is illegitimate. The father left the family, perhaps because of the pregnancy, perhaps because he was intimated by Margaret's personality or her faith. For whatever reason, the mother's guilt for that sin is laid upon Carrie; she implicates her daughter because she cannot face and atone for her own sin.In this sense Carrie is immediately comparable to A Nightmare on Elm Street, which dealt with the theme of the sins of the father in a more surrealistic way. But there are also strong connections with Suspiria, Dario Argento's giallo masterpiece which was in pre-production when Carrie was released. Both films are very stylish and striking in their manipulation of colour. Mario Tosi's cinematography contains the same shimmering blues and Technicolor reds that Argento's work features in abundance.

But more than that, both Carrie and Suspiria have huge elements of fairy tales about them. Where Suspiria is modelled on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Carrie is a reworking of Cinderella with the final act subverted. Instead of a handsome prince coming to save the day and everything working out fine, Carrie descends into hell, embracing her extraordinary powers and losing all feelings for anyone else. In this context Carrie's classmates are the ugly sisters (with the handsome prince being in on the act) and Margaret is the wicked stepmother, a further indication that Carrie is illegitimate.The film simply wouldn't work without the performance of Sissy Spacek, who is nothing short of phenomenal. Having first come to prominence in Badlands, Spacek was originally cast to play Christine Hargensen, the role which eventually went to Nancy Allen. Determined to change De Palma's mind, she smeared Vaseline into her hair and turned up to the final audition in a dress she wore in seventh grade. She brings a heart-breaking fragility to the role, making us feel so strongly for her character that we almost find ourselves cheering in the midst of her carnage. The image of the blood-stained Carrie walking home, or climbing the stairs into the attic, is simultaneously touching and terrifying.The only thing which prevents Carrie from being a full-blooded masterpiece is some of De Palma's visual trickery. Many of his decisions work well, adding to the tone and substance of the film. When Carrie and Tommy are dancing, the camera is at a Dutch angle and twirls around at a faster pace than the couple. This and the final dream sequence, which was filmed in reverse, successfully reinforce the magical, fairy tale quality of the story. And the use of slow-motion up to and include the pig blood falling do add a real sense of tension.But once the pig blood hits the fan, De Palma gets carried away and his visual decisions undercut the climactic scene. Using split-screen undermines the sense of unbridled panic we are meant to have: by asking us to focus on two different things at once, we both lose a sense of scale and find it hard to focus on the often-poetic justice being meted out to. The Metropolis-style kaleidoscope view of people laughing doesn't contribute all that much, and the looping of her mother's voice ("they're all gonna laugh at you!") makes the whole thing feel like the final groove of Sgt. Pepper.Despite its slightly botched ending and some overly conventional jumps, Carrie is a damn fine film which still has the power to unnerve after 35 years. Spacek's extraordinary performance is supported by some fine work from Nancy Allen and Piper Laurie, along with a brief appearance from John Travolta on the cusp of superstardom. Where De Palma's later works would be memorably shocking, this is shockingly memorable, and remains one of the high points of his often distinguished career.

Rating:
Verdict: First-rate teen terror

Jaws (USA, 1975)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Starring Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gray

When interviewed for Bravo's The 100 Scariest Movie Moments, Clive Barker commented that sometimes the best ideas of how to scare people are so seemingly obvious that we overlook them without realising. In hindsight it seems absurd that no-one ever considered making a horror film about sharks before. And after Steven Spielberg set the bar with Jaws, no-one would ever come close again.Jaws is Spielberg doing what he does best: pure popcorn entertainment, with a school of memorable scenes, cracking dialogue and substance trickling through in amongst the thrills and spills. What seems on the surface to be a one-trick film drawn out over two hours gradually emerges as something which is not only scary but very well-made, with characters which are intelligently drawn and action scenes which communicate the themes rather than feeling like awkward set-pieces.Like Star Wars after it, you could be forgiven for hating Jaws given the legacy it has left behind. Apart from the three inferior sequels and dozens of derivative knock-offs, it was the film which invented both the summer blockbuster and the high-concept movie -a film which you could sum up in 25 words or less, which would be translated by producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer into the aggressive money-driven ethos of modern Hollywood.Jaws has been blamed for everything from the death of New Hollywood to the infantilisation of mainstream cinema, and that's not to mention the recent criticism of conservationists about falling shark numbers. But whatever one's attitude to Spielberg in light of his subsequent career choices, it's at best guesswork and at worst sour grapes to argue that he intended any of these things to happen. Had he gone the path of his colleague George Lucas, and milked his hit for everything it had, only then would it be fair to pose such questions.With this in mind we have to re-assess Jaws as nothing more than a piece of entertainment. And on that level, it's undeniably brilliant. In adapting Peter Benchley's potboiler, Spielberg quickly dispensed of the melodramatic subplots involving extramarital affairs and power struggles on Amity Island. On this occasion, it was best to quite literally cut to the chase, with the shark becoming the centrepiece and fear being the driving force.

Spielberg once described Jaws as an aquatic version of Duel, his made-for-TV film from four year earlier about a man being chased by a truck. The comparison is very close both in Spielberg's knack for creating tension and in the characterisation of the villain. Both the truck and the shark are irrational forces of nature: they have no backstory, no character origin and no discernable motivation other than a relentless desire to kill. As a further connection, the deaths of both truck and shark are overdubbed with the sound of Godzilla dying from the 1954 original - an indication of Spielberg's affinity for B-movies and that he understands that monster movies can have a deeper significance.As with Duel, it doesn't matter that the monster in Jaws doesn't make a lot of sense. There was and is precious little to suggest that sharks prey on humans for sport; more people die every year from falling coconuts than being eaten by sharks. But the film is not so much about killer sharks as it is about characters being confronted by an unstoppable force which they never faced before and cannot hope to understand. It could almost be called the father of Hallowe'en in its contrast of peaceful, boring middle-class life with a ruthless, blood-hungry predator.This contrast is best observed in the opening section of the film. Having given us a great early jump with the death of the skinny-dipper, Spielberg withholds the shark to build up the relationships between the townsfolk. We see Roy Scheider's sleepy world slowly descend into panic and really feel his frustration when the town council and the press ignore his demands about closing the beach. As the children enter the water to swim and the attack begins, the dramatic irony kicks in and what was once a perfectly ordinary and rational community is torn apart forever.Much has been written about the production problems which Spielberg faced on Jaws which meant he could not shoot as much of the shark as he wanted. Three full-scale mechanical sharks were built for the production, and all three regularly failed due to everything from short circuits to corroding skin and getting caught in seaweed. Such failures were one of the main reasons the film went so far over-schedule and over-budget: what started as a $4m movie shooting for 55 days ended up as a $9m movie that shot for 159 days.In the end, the problems with the shark were not merely serendipitous: they helped to create one of the defining features of the film. Because he could not show the monster as he wanted, Spielberg had to improvise with different techniques which could hint at what the shark was capable of doing. It's testament to his ability as a filmmaker that he could achieve so much threat and suspense from little more than a dorsal fin and a few barrels - enhanced by his use of the former to comedic effect early in the film. Through these techniques, the shark takes on a quality of amorphous evil whose only real equal at the time was Rover from The Prisoner.

But as before, Jaws is less about the shark than the characters reacting to it, and no matter how much of the action revolves around 'Bruce', we keep coming back to the people. In its second hour, where most of the action takes places on the Orca, we genuinely bond with this foolhardy trio and soak up all the conflicts within their personalities. Brody's determination to protect his family is contrasted by Quint's obsessive streak and Hooper's feeling of being - no pun intended - a fish out of water.As with The Sting, Robert Shaw dominates every scene that he is in. His accent may be a little harder to pin down this time, but his piercing intensity and unkempt manner give him unrivalled screen presence. Although much of his early lines are played for comedy, to set him up as a loose cannon against the uptight Brody and Hooper, he gradually takes on a more intense, obsessive quality which lead you to wonder whether or not the shark has driven him mad.The best scene in Jaws comes when the three men are sitting in the boat at night and Quint begins talking about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. In a speech co-written by John Milius (who scripted Apocalypse Now), he talks about his experience with sharks in the same way that Colonel Kurtz talked about horror - as something to be somehow embraced and understood, even at the cost of one's sanity or soul. The dialogue in this section is reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway's work in The Old Man and the Sea, with man and nature locked in battle, both mentally and physically, while all around there is only silence.Jaws remains a high-water mark in Spielberg's career and in those of all the performers. It isn't as relentless as Hallowe'en in its ability to sustain fear, and Spielberg's work on the Indiana Jones series would eventually surpass it. But that is mere nit-picking in the face of a film of great craft and vision, a film which proves that simple entertainment can be smart and that, under the right circumstances, people enjoy being scared.

Rating:
Verdict: Pure and simple terror