Rated PG

One of the key elements that may have enamored readers around the world to the adventures of Tintin—a plucky boy journalist who fought corruption, solved mysteries and chased adventure in a Belgian comic series for more than half of the 20th century—was how well it balanced complexity of story with accessibility of style. Tintin, in both character and form, was drawn with bold, precise lines, subtle colors and no shading whatsoever. This “Ligne Claire” technique, spearheaded by Tintin’s creator, Hergé, was a fine match for the hero himself, who very rarely, if ever, broke beyond the boy-scout simplicity at his core. He subsequently became a wonderfully blank slate for followers to imprint themselves onto, step into his shoes, and actively engage in the adventures of imagination in which he was so often embroiled.

It’s laudable that director Steven “Indiana Jones” Spielberg, producer Peter “Lord of the Rings” Jackson and their respective crews from DreamWorks and Weta have apparently embraced this aspect of the character in their new collaborative adaptation, not bothering to give Tintin an origin story, a girlfriend, parents, or even a last name. But it’s a sad moment when, not two minutes into the film, they very obviously jettison Hergé’s gloriously clean artistic style, revealing Tintin to the audience as a street artist’s caricature straight from the books, only to immediately dismiss it and send the young man into an absolute cacophony of computerized detail and texture. Where the original artwork put hyper-stylized people into realistically rendered backdrops with little differentiation of emphasis between the two, the practice is not served so well in this new medium. The wild levels of information Jackson’s Weta animators have crammed into every frame of this movie quickly becomes difficult and eventually impossible to take in. As a wise man once said, when everything is important, nothing is.

The action, when it hits, is simply exhausting, a blinding whirlwind of elements crashing in all directions at once, straddling a peculiar no-man’s-land between hyper-realism and ’30s-era cartoons. There’s not a moment’s break for the audience to absorb any sense of real peril or consequence.

The only element left of the source material’s simplicity may unfortunately lie in the writing of the characters themselves, who remain decidedly one-dimensional and positively antiquated despite the ultra-modern depths of the 3-D environments into which they’re swallowed. Tintin, as a perennial catalyst for the development of those around him, is supposed to be a completely empty canvas. Fine. But his associate on this trip, the irascible Captain Haddock (voiced with a suitably salty Scottish brogue by Jackson vet Andy Serkis), a force to be reckoned with in the books, has been reduced to nothing more than an irretrievable dipsomaniac. His whole existence is distilled down to a constant, frightening scrabble for that next gulp of whiskey. This is, at first, not half as funny as the filmmakers think it is, and soon thereafter, fairly embarrassing, and eventually, really quite excruciating to watch.

Though the script (a blend of three classic Tintin tales: “The Crab with the Golden Claws,” “The Secret of the Unicorn” and “Red Rackham’s Treasure”) comes from the hopeful team of British geek trifecta Steven Moffat (“Doctor Who”), Edgar Wright (“Shaun of the Dead”) and Joe Cornish (“Attack the Block”), their attempts to preserve the old-timey themes of a bygone time produce some uncomfortably out-of-date results. There can be little doubt that Spielberg is unleashing his inner 8-year-old with this film, his first experiment with animation. There is a clear, childish glee at work in many of the scenes. However, it would seem his inner 8-year-old is still living in 1954, an age unnervingly misinformed by three decades of Saturday matinee serials featuring the coolness of firearms, a complete absence of female influence, and the comedic effect of abject, hopeless alcoholism. Under his watch, the story is written as an exercise in aggressive regression, actively thumbing its nose at contemporary sensibilities and covering a moral spectrum that appears to a modern eye as quaint on one end and downright barbaric on the other.

For such an ambitious reintroduction of past heroes as Spielberg has attempted here—one that is poised to spark a new series for the next generation (a sequel, to be directed by Jackson, is already underway)—it’s unfortunate how little further exploration this adventure actually compels. If Tintin himself, intrepid investigator that he is, could step off the page and buy a ticket to this flick, he’d most likely just shake his head about halfway through, pick up his dog and sneak into the next screening room to catch Spielberg’s other recent throwback, “Warhorse.”