Official Tintin news!

Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn has been confirmed as the first in the Tintin trilogy that is currently being put into preproduction by the dream-team of Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson. Cast as the young reporter is Jamie Bell with Daniel Craig playing the pirate Red Rackham. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost will play Thompson and Thompson and several unconfirmed roles are slated for Andy Serkis (heavily tipped to play Captain Haddock), Toby Jones and Mackenzie Crook. It's a pretty excellent line up of actors and with Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish and Steven Moffat lined up as the trilogy's writers, this series is looking better by the day.

Spielberg will direct the first film, The Secret of the Unicorn, with Jackson helming the sequel and another unnamed director lined up for the trilogy cap. We'll have to wait til 2011 for the first installment, but the line-up looks excellent. This could be something very special indeed.

QUANTUM OF SOLACE (2008) - Marc Forster

The reinvented James Bond franchise kicked off in 2006 with Casino Royale. It featured a brand new Bond with Daniel Craig and a brand new approach to the character and action. Gone were the gadgets. Gone was the campiness. Gone was the high-tech, slightly ridiculous approach to the character and stories. What we got was a Bond for the 21st Century. Angry, no-nonsense, ruthless. It was an approach not all were convinced about. But the film was a success, both critically and financially. And now, the latest Bond film, a direct sequel to Casino Royale arrives on our screens with (the cryptically titled) Quantum Of Solace. Can lightning strike twice?

As mentioned, Quantum Of Solace is a direct sequel to Casino Royale. It picks up pretty soon after the previous film’s events. Bond has kidnapped Mr. White, the only lead he has to the shadowy corporation whom La Chiffre was a member. His interrogation of Mr. White goes horribly wrong and an attempt on M’s life is foiled. Bond goes rogue. He claims to be hunting down M’s attempted assassins, but his motives are questionable as he’s also out for revenge for the death of Vesper Lynd, his lover who died at the end of Casino Royale. Bond’s investigation leads him to Dominic Greene, a businessman and philanthropist who’s motives are also questionable. He teams up with a woman named Camille and they both aim to take Greene down.



Casino Royale was a great success. The filmmakers seemed to get everything right, despite an ending that was a little sloppy. So where in the hell did they go wrong with Quantum Of Solace? To put it mildly, it’s a complete mess. The first problem the film has is the story. The script is dull, clunky and pretty much all over the place. They say too many cooks spoil the broth. Never is that clearer here. There are three writers credited with the writing of the film, one of whom is Paul Haggis, writer and director of the Oscar-winning Crash. Yet despite this calibre, Quantum Of Solace zips by with scenes that make no sense, motives that are pretty irrelevant and a Bond who seems to just wander from one scene to the other kicking the crap out of random bad guys and then meandering to the next story event. It seems that everything they got right with Casino Royale, they got wrong in Quantum Of Solace.

Let me get this down for the record. When Daniel Craig was announced as the Bond to follow Pierce Brosnan, questions were raised. Yet, I thought it was a great casting. And, I was right. Craig is the best Bond since Sean Connery, and he suits the reinvented Bond perfectly. And yet here, Craig is given a script that is really poor. They’ve made Bond cold and calculated. Perfect. And yet in this movie they’ve also made him someone subject to events rather than the driving force. It’s a bad move and allows the film to fall flat on it’s face.

Another question that needs to be raised is the question of the Bond girl. Vesper Lynd was a character with a little depth. Camille, the main Bond girl in Quantum Of Solace shows a little depth, but this is abandoned the more the character is developed. And she’s not developed very much. The character ticks two boxes; hot, and pissed off. But apart from that, she’s not got very much. It’s not Olga Kurylenko’s fault. She’s not bad as Camille. But there’s little for her to do in terms of character. And the less said about Gemma Arterton’s character, Strawberry Fields (good Lord), the better. She’s a bad leftover from the Roger Moore era Bond films, and is one of the most pointless and badly written characters in any movie I’ve seen in a long time. Her costume in her opening scene alone is evidence that the writers, and director Marc Forster have lost everything that worked in Casino Royale.



The other glaring fault in Quantum Of Solace is the action sequences. And man alive, this is where I get a little irate about the film. If I wanted to watch one of the Bourne films, I would have plucked one of the DVDs from my collection and not wasted the money I spent on this film. I wonder, if Paul Greengrass watched Quantum Of Solace, did he consider suing the makers of the film for plagiarism. Several action sequences are lifted straight out of the Bourne films. It was obvious from Casino Royale that the filmmakers were influenced by the Bourne films. They did, after all, reinvent the action movie for the new century. But here, Marc Forster et al make no attempt to hide the influence. If you’ve seen the Bourne films, don’t waste your time with Quantum Of Solace. The action sequences, for the most part, are lifted directly from that series. It’s actually quite amazing how similar they are. Marc Forster is a drama director. He did well with Monster’s Ball, and managed to reduce myself and a bunch of other lads to sobbing messes with Finding Neverland. So maybe it’s that he’s not used to directing action. But there is a marked difference to when he’s directing the action and when second unit director, and stunt coordinator on The Bourn Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, Dan Bradley is behind the camera. One style is sloppy and confusing. The other style is, well... Bourne. Bradley does a great job. But we’ve seen it before.

When it comes down to it, Quantum Of Solace is a mess. There’s no other way about it. The lessons learned from Casino Royale are forgotten here. And what we’re left with is a sloppy, badly-developed and underwhelming film. There is a question as to whether this movie will stand as the bad, middle part of a trilogy. But that’s little in the way of an excuse. Many sequels and bridging films have been excellent, and stand-alone films. However, when, in about 5 years, we have the (possible) Craig-Bond trilogy, I think most will skip the mess that is Quantum Of Solace.


4/10

THE GOLDEN COMPASS (2007) - Chris Weitz

Since the release of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, studios have been falling over themselves to release movies that capture the magic that Peter Jackson’s movies did so well. To the studios, these movies bring in mega bucks since they’re aimed at the family, the most lucrative of cinema audiences. To this end, they find any piece of fantasy fiction and immediately rush it into production. Unfortunately, the time and care that Jackson put into The Lord of the Rings isn’t always applied to these other movies, and the resulting films always seem to lack something. And this is blatantly apparent in Chris Weitz adaptation of Philip Pullman’s novel, Northern Lights. Or The Golden Compass, as the movie is known.

The Golden Compass takes Pullman’s incredibly popular novel, the first his ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy, and translates it to the big screen. Dealing with many different (and in some places, controversial) themes, this first movie concentrates on a precocious little girl named Lyra Belacqua. Lyra lives in a parallel universe to our own. A universe where peoples’ souls accompany them in the form of a animal who can communicate, and lives in harmony with his or her human counterpart. Lyra attends Jordan College. After her uncle, a scientist named Lord Asriel leaves for an expedition to investigate the possibility of parallel universes, Lyra comes into possession of an alethiometer, or golden compass which can answer any question Lyra cares to ask it. This alethiometer is something the Magesterium, the overlords wish to possess. To this end, they send Mrs. Coulter to take Lyra away from Jordan. Lyra doesn’t trust Mrs. Coulter and escapes her. She sets off to find her lost friends, who have been taken by Gobblers, who’s sinister plans put the entire world in peril.



That is basically the plot of the Golden Compass. Sounds kind of convoluted, doesn’t it? And in a way, it is. It’s not a difficult film to follow, but there’s a lot to take in. And the plot is fired at the audience so fast that you cant help but feel the film is an incredibly rushed effort. I’ve heard some great things about Pullman’s Dark Materials books, and I do intend to read them. This film really didn’t put me off doing that. However, it’s a badly made film.

As mentioned, the plot is incredibly rushed through. Events pass at a pace that makes you want to shout out at everybody to slow down for a moment at take a breath. But this isn’t a good thing. Everything seems skirted over. And to that end, there’s no sense of dread of events that are perilous for the world. Nothing seems incredibly important, and you just feel that things just keep happily falling into place. Characters pop into the story, and just seem to join Lyra on her quest for no other reason but having nothing better to do. And this is the major flaw of The Golden Compass. Things happen too fast and too easily with no sense of peril if things go wrong.



The direction, from Weitz, who (with his brother, Paul) struck box office gold with American Pie and the surprisingly good About A Boy, seems out of his depth. At moments, the camera makes bizarre swoops and the action cuts to odd angles, and it seems that Weitz is doing this just to add the feeling of something epic to otherwise small worldly events. The pace of the film is bizarrely slow for a film where events pass so quickly, and you will, at moments, find yourself very, very bored. The special effects aren’t bad. I mean, for a film of this magnitude, you’d expect the special effects to be spiffy, and while they’re not groundbreaking by any measure, they’re not terrible. As with the rest of the film, they’re just spectacularly mundane.

The acting isn’t terrible. Dakota Blue Richards (who sounds like some sort of country and western singer) isn’t as bad an actress as the trailer for the movie made her out to be. However, her character is incredibly smug and irritating. I don’t know if she is like this in the book, but in this film, you cant help but find yourself wishing, at moments, that she’d just lose! Daniel Craig pops up for about 6 minutes of screen time as Lord Azriel, and while he’s perfectly acceptable in the role, he has little to nothing to do. Nicole Kidman is in ice-queen mode as Mrs. Coulter. As with most of her roles, Kidman is pretty bland. This, I expect, is the point of the role. But for the film’s ‘bad guy,’ you just don’t detest her enough for her to make an impact. Sam Elliot is really imaginatively cast as an American gun-slinger cum airship pilot. And Sir Ian McKellan resurrects his Gandalf voice for his role as Iorek Byrnison, an ice-bear prince who dedicates his life to Lyra. Oh yeah, Eva Green pops up for a moment as a witch who you feel should be more consequential to the plot, but isn’t. There are other cameos from famous names such as Derek Jacobi and Christopher Lee, but again, their roles are pretty pointless.

The most disappointing thing about The Golden Compass is that you know there’s something to the story. The source material must be jam-packed with glorious detail. I’ve heard wonderful things about the books and I do look forward to them. But the film is stripped of all this. It just all seems rather pointless. And having heard there are themes of atheism that really got the Christians railed up, my interest is piqued even more. However, all this controversial material is removed from the film, and what is left is a really bland, uninspiring, and ultimately boring family film.


4/10