Archive Movies

The Adventures of Tintin on the Riviera

2011-10-26 12:25

What: The Adventures of Tintin (2011)
Where: Cinema Sporting Monaco, Cinema Rialto Nice
When: Wed 26 October to Tuesday 1 November
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig

Showing all week:

in Monaco: 2pm, 4.30pm, 9pm (French language version)
in Nice: 11.10am, 1.40pm, 3.50pm, 5.55pm, 8.05pm, 10.10pm (English original)



Steven Spielberg's film version of the Adventures of Tintin has opened, with a French language version at the Cinema Sporting in Monaco, and the English-language version playing at the Rialto in Nice all this week.

The veteran director of ET and Indiana Jones has used the latest motion capture techniques to bring the celebrated stories of Belgian artist Georges Rémi - better known to the world as Hergé - to the screen. It's been a long-held dream of this director to make a film of the comic-book hero he first encountered thirty years ago, and now he has done so with in spectacular style with a fast-paced CGI adventure voiced by British actors Jamie Bell (of Billy Elliot fame) and Daniel Craig (whose reputation precedes him).

This is not the first time that Tintin has been made into a film. In the 1960s, two live action movies were produced in France - 'Tintin and the Golden Fleece', and 'Tintin and the Blue Oranges', although neither film was based on an original Tintin adventure. And neither met with the great success that perhaps was imagined for them.  In fact most viewers will be more familiar with the animated TV series which ran for 40 episodes in the early 1990s - or with the original books themselves.

Fans of Hergé's brilliant 'bandes desinées' are split: on the one hand the new film by Steven Spielberg keeps the dream of the boy detective alive, but on the other there is some disgruntlement that the clean lines of Hergé should have been replaced with the rather waxy look of modern-day CGI. For its detractors, the film is neither fish nor fowl. They argue that it would have been better to stick to the original drawings.

But whatever the look of the new film, Spielberg and producer Peter Jackson have gone one stage further than those early French efforts by basing their story on an actual Tintin adventure - or to be more precise a mash-up of three Tintin adventures: The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure. The resulting script by Steven Moffat (familiar to British audiences as the author of scripts for 'Dr Who' and 'Sherlock') has met with universal praise, and will no doubt prove to be one of the most compellling reasons for the film's long-term future.