European Graphic Novels+

The fact is I didn't finish the movie because around the halfway mark it was getting way too 'Indiana Jones' for my taste, not that I dislike classic Indy by any stretch.

Indeed, I thought Spielberg & crew did a truly wonderful job on the style, the characters, the animation, the music, the voices... but... at a certain point the movie was becoming 'less and less Tintin,' and that's when I bailed. (around halfway-through for the record)

Reading the ciné album was pretty cool in that it gave me a chance, over a decade later, to check out how things went from that point.

Unfortunately for me, things only got 'less and less Tintin' from there. The plot from the original books was tossed overboard for over-the-top action scenes (as in the plaza), and then muscled out by some sort of ridiculous mechanismic-proxy battle between The Captain and Sakharine, near the end.

Now yes-- while I'll admit that Spielberg's conversion of 3rd-party Ivan Sakharine to 'starring villain' worked a lot better than I would have predicted, at a certain point it just went too far. To me there was no longer any trace of Hergé's touch, nor much evidence of the original plot or Tintin content. Instead it felt more like 'just Hollywood stuff.'

I think my biggest personal disappointment was the complete omission of the seafaring - island experience as experienced in Red Rackham's Treasure. Now, while I can totally understand that the pacing of that second album of the two-parter couldn't possibly fit with the established pace of the movie (*ahem* by Spielberg's design), nevertheless it felt to me like much of the heart & soul of the story had been abandoned to the harmonic detriment of the overall story, so to speak.

In any case, all of the above is 'just me.' Certainly lots of other people will disagree and tell me I'm wrong. And maybe I am. So there, then.