Things Only Adults Notice In The Adventures Of Tintin

We need to quit calling great action movies "thrill rides," not just because it's a cliché but because after The Adventures of Tintin, no other movie can live up to it. The animated story of Tintin (Jamie Bell), a daring young reporter searching for lost treasure with the help of his dog Snowy and the washed-up Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), never stops throwing wondrous images in viewers' faces. 

There's the spectacularly realistic rendering of faraway places in long-ago times, from a European port town to the Sahara desert to a North African city that hasn't aged a day after a decade's worth of technical advancement. And then there's the action that director Steven Spielberg fills that world with — fencing battles with industrial cranes, a pirate ship swinging from the mast of its quarry as cutthroats jump from one deck to another, and a chase between a falcon and a motorcycle that morphs into a unicycle. And that's not even mentioning the tank that turns a hotel into a rolling fortress.

In other words, it's got everything kids will love, but if adults can pick their jaws off the floor long enough to slow down and examine the details, they'll find plenty of subtler pleasures under the flash to hold their interest. Here are just a few of them.

Many of the best callbacks to Hergé's books are right at the beginning of the film, in a credits sequence animated with silhouettes and bold colors in a much simpler style than the film's groundbreaking mo-cap. There are bits and pieces of Hergé's original art scattered throughout, like the stars that erupt from Tintin's head when he's cold-cocked or the original cover of the Secret of the Unicorn story that inspired the movie. The credits also feature a loose plot of Tintin tracking the thief of a glowing orb that looks identical to the ones from Hergé's The Seven Crystal Balls.

One scene also takes him to a train station, and if you pause at the right moment, you'll find it's packed full of hidden callbacks, with every destination on the departures board — from the real (Tibet) to the invented (Syldavia), from the mundane (Hergé's hometown, Brussels) to the fantastical (the moon). In the next scene, Tintin chases the bad guys onto a train that speeds past images from the Tintin books, including the rocket from Destination Moon, the title location of The Black Island, and the Olmec head from Flight 714. There are plenty more Easter eggs, but we won't spoil them all for you. Just pick up a stack of Tintin books, and give the movie another look.

Tintin's been around a long time, but he's still a long way from being the first fictional hero to travel the globe solving mysteries. That long lineage includes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's great detective Sherlock Holmes, and The Adventures of Tintin tips its hat to its forebear. 

Doyle's stories featured Homes' longsuffering landlady, Mrs. Hudson, a dowdy old woman who was frequently shocked by Holmes' eccentric habits. The Adventures of Tintin includes a speaking role for Tintin's dowdy old landlady Mrs. Finch. And Mrs. Hudson could take some notes from her easygoing attitude to Tintin's shenanigans. When he tells her, "A man's been shot on our doorstep," her only response is, "What, again?"

You could spend some time arguing over whether Mrs. Finch's appearance is an intentional reference or not, but there's another unquestionable Holmes callback a few scenes later. To escape from the hold where the bad guys have trapped him, Tintin climbs up to Captain Haddock's cabin, but not before he tosses Snowy up ahead of him. There's nothing unusual about the little white dog, but Haddock's so sloshed the sight terrifies him, and he shouts, "The giant rat of Sumatra!"

He's apparently been reading his Doyle. The name comes from "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire," where Holmes recalls "a ship which is associated with the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared." Apparently, the world never was prepared for that story, since Doyle never wrote it.

The Adventures of Tintin was a special treat for grown-up cinephiles as a showcase for Steven Spielberg, one of the most important directors in Hollywood. He's racked up classics from Jurassic Park and Jaws to Schindler's List and E.T. But one part of his career will definitely be on viewers' minds while watching Tintin – the Indiana Jones films. 

Those movies also took a globetrotting hero across a world that existed before World War II really started, all in search of ancient treasures, with characters traveling by seaplanes and rusty iron ships. And if the fictional sultanate of Bagghar isn't the same as the Egyptian city Indy traveled to in Raiders of the Lost Ark, it's not too far off, either. Plus, Tintin narrowly escapes the fate of Raiders' Nazi mechanic when he passes out next to a propeller. And both movies even feature a secret message that's only visible when the sun hits an age-old artifact just right.

That's no coincidence. The Philippine Daily Inquirer reports Spielberg's love of Tintin began with the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which one critic at the time compared to Hergé's comics. Spielberg had never heard of Tintin before, but soon he was hooked, and he spent the next several decades trying to bring it to the big screen, beginning with a 1984 production that would've starred Jack Nicholson as Captain Haddock. Those dreams finally came true in 2011 — minus Nicholson — and it was more than worth the wait.

After 50 years and a staggering number of movies, you wouldn't think there'd be any new ideas left for Spielberg to try. But Tintin obviously energized the then-65-year-old director because the movie is more kinetic and restlessly inventive than almost anything else he's made.

A lot of that comes from his move to animation. Instead of a big, bulky camera, Spielberg gets to work with one that's literally weightless because it only exists in computer code. That means he can do all kinds of tricks that would be impossible in live-action. The simulated "camera" can begin a shot zoomed all the way in on the reflection in a pirate's sword and then move all the way out until both ships look as small as bathtub toys. It can begin one shot behind the controls of a crane, then move straight through the windshield all the way across the docks and behind the windshield of another as smoothly as if the glass didn't exist ... because it doesn't.

Most spectacular of all, there's the chase scene in Bagghar, which goes on for nearly five minutes without a cut. Normally, this means we'd be stuck looking from the same perspective the whole time. Even the most ambitious live-action filmmaker couldn't cover any more space than they could lay down tracks for. Tintin doesn't have any of those limitations. That one shot covers miles of space, jumping up into the sky and darting seamlessly in and out of buildings.

Tintin gets some help in his adventures from two bumbling Interpol agents named Thomson and Thompson. They may look identical with their bowler hats, mustaches, and canes, but thanks to the magic of motion capture, they're portrayed by two actors who've made a career of playing their very different body types off each other. 

Yeah, it's portly Nick Frost and thin Simon Pegg. Audiences first saw them together in the British sitcom Spaced, where they played two London slackers who've been friends since childhood. They then collaborated with series creator Edgar Wright on the "rom-zom-com" Shaun of the Dead, where their characters try to survive the zombie apocalypse and hopefully get Shaun (Pegg) back together with his girlfriend (Kate Ashfield). 

This began the "Cornetto trilogy," a series of collaborations between the stars and the director, all of them including product placement for the titular ice cream makers. Next was Hot Fuzz, where they played two cops who discover a deadly conspiracy in a sleepy British village, followed by The World's End, a bittersweet but hilarious story where a bunch of school friends reunite to recreate their pre-graduation pub crawl ... even after they discover an alien invasion.