Born just two months apart in the spring of 1997, Georgia-born Moretz and Islington’s Butterfield offer an age of innocence which belies their off-screen maturity thanks to previous heavy duty work like Kick-Ass and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Meanwhile, with his thin wrists memorably dangling some distance below his cuffs, Hugo survives by pinching food and running in and out of a clock tower above a Paris railway station.ĭown below, a miserable old man (Sir Ben Kingsley) is trying to scratch a living and Sacha Baron Cohen’s station inspector and dog are always on the look-out for thieves.Īn opening series of dazzling tracking shots through Paris’s streets and railway architecture mean that Hugo is at its best before the title belatedly appears on screen. Station book shop owner Monsieur Labisse (Christopher Lee) might also be able to help Hugo and new friend Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) with their research. ![]() Orphaned Hugo (Asa Butterfield) rescues a similar mechanical clockwork figure and hopes it will have a message from his own father (Jude Law). ![]() Recreating something as alchemic as the birth of the movies enables Scorsese to introduce younger generations to silent movie stars like Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin.Īnd the pioneering work of film-makers like the Lumière Bros and fellow French inventor Georges Méliès – whose 1902 film A Trip to the Moon is featured here, having inspired Selznick as a child. If, with his first attempt at making a 3D film, Scorsese can make his breathtaking action sequences seem less contrived, but just as exciting as Spielberg’s, then why would any film-maker want to make his actors labour towards the artificial consequences of motion capture in the future?Īdapted from Brian Selznick’s 2007 best-seller The Adventures of Hugo Cabret Hugo’s pioneering technical triumphs are underpinned with a rare awareness of the film’s own place in silver screen history. But, in Tintin, the faces remained as horribly plasticised as they were in Robert Zemeckis’s Polar Express (2004). Motion capture worked in Avatar because James Cameron was creating new creatures in imaginary worlds. In particular, you might ask yourself whether Scorsese has now ‘‘disinvented’’ modern cinema.īy going back in time to enhance tomorrow’s world today, will the veteran New Yorker have encouraged his Hollywood contemporaries to take a step back from one of its current obsessions? Hot on the heels of Steven Spielberg’s motion capture experiment with The Adventures of Tintin, director Martin Scorsese returns with a live action movie set in and around a Paris railway station in 1931.Īnd it’s this story of a boy who needs to unlock the secrets of his past which is the greater 3D triumph.Īs well as recalling the wondrous invention of the moving image more than a century ago, Hugo questions the nature of – and creative need for – silver screen special effects.
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