Martin Scorcese's Hugo is an Awful Shit Pile of a Waste
So I went to see this new movie "Hugo" last night. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a steaming pile of horseshit. It's not just that it's bad, which it is, it's also an obnoxious bait-and-switch, luring people in with promises of a rollicking steampunk fantasy adventure and instead delivering a sermon on the importance of film preservation. No, really. That's what the movie's about. If you had relied entirely on the trailers to tell you what "Hugo" was about, you would be justified in thinking, like I had, that this was some sort of childrens' sci-fi romp because the ads rely entirely on the clockwork automaton that is the focus of the movie's pointless first hour. I suspected, based on the fact that all the clockwork gears in the ads were totally shiny and new, that this was going to be one of those movies that crams whimsy down your throat, but my sister wanted to see it so I was willing to take a chance.
When the movie opens, our titular hero is a circa 1930s orphan living in a Paris train station. He finds a broken clockwork robot that he is convinced contains a message from his dead father if he could only get it working again. It sounds like a perfectly servicable orphan's trinket plot that no one could mess up, right? You'd be surprised. After an hour or so of pointless shenanigans and endless scenes of Sasha Baron Cohen chasing Hugo through gear-encrusted clockworks, a deus ex machina randomly plops the answer into Hugo's lap. Hugo activates the robot and it reveals...NOT a message from Hugo's father, but rather that the guy running the train station toy shop is long-lost silent filmmaker Georges Méliès. Actually, no. It doesn't reveal that, it only reveals a hint that the guy is Méliès (The robot draws a picture of the famous "Trip to the Moon" scene where the moon has a rocket in his eye and sign it with the toy shop owner's name ), so we have to spend another hour following the blandly nice Hugo and his be-bereted pseudo-girlfriend (the toy shop guys' goddaughter) wander around trying to piece together the mystery that the audience already knows the answer to. Oh, great, an uninteresting mystery with no stakes where I already know the outcome from the get-go? Yeah, that's riveting cinema.
Okay, so the two kids FINALLY figure out that the girl's godfather is Méliès, but now there's a new wrinkle. Méliès can't make films anymore because of a painful secret from his past and he flies into a howling, weeping rage when he's confronted with evidence of his past work. Okay, great, a THIRD boring pointless mystery. First of all, if I were a homeless orphan living in a train station and being forced to steal bread to survive, I don't think I would give a shit that some old rich guy was too sad to make his crappy stilted period movies anymore. Whether he makes movies or not, that doesn't change anything for Hugo's situation, so I have no clue what's really at stake or why the characters are so concerned. Second, since this is the real meat of the plot, why did we just waste like a million hours getting to this point? Instead of having all the bullshit with the robot, why not just start the movie off with Hugo discovering that the toy shop guy is Méliès and move directly into the "WHY IS MELIES SAD" mystery? That would have shaved about two hours of bloat off of this ponderous slog. Oh, but this is a Martin Scorcese movie, and Scorcese seems to think that LONG=DEEP. This is the guy that made "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull?" Now he makes these baroque Oscar bait monstrosities. This seems to afflict a lot of directors later in life, when they get to that "I WANT TO MAKE SOMETHING MY GRANDCHILDREN CAN ENJOY" phase.
Okay, so what could it be that's so traumatized Méliès? I suspected, like everyone else I spoke to about this film, that it would turn out that someone had accidentally been killed during one of his shoots and now he was wracked with guilt. That would have been kind of cliched, but at least it would have made sense. Instead, it turns out that World War I happened, and people were so scarred by the death and destruction that they didn't feel like watching Méliès' goony movies anymore. That's right, his secret pain is BOO HOO I'M NOT POPULAR ANYMORE. This just makes Méliès come across as a colossal self-involved baby.
I think this plot point could be compared to the recent Muppets movie, which also hinged around a problem of BOO HOO WE'RE NOT POPULAR ANYMORE. It's kind of instructive to see how the Muppets handled the same issue in a way that actually made you feel sympathetic for the protagonists and want to see them succeed. In "Hugo," I did not care a whit whether some angry old guy -- who actually goes out of his way to be an asshole to Hugo, whom he pretty much knows is a homless orphan, early in the movie, by stealing his one prized possession and telling Hugo that he threw it into the furnace -- got the public to suck his withered old dick again.
Anyway, earlier in the film, some film historian who has a life-long passion for Méliès told Hugo that all of Méliès' films had been lost. Oh no! But then, at the end, after Hugo convinces Méliès not to give up on life, they hold some gala where the historian comes out and says "Hey, after searching through vaults and stuff, we found 80 films!" Oh. Great, so when you say that all his filsm had been lost, you mean that you just never bothered looking for them? Yeah, I see you have a real dedication to that supposed passion of yours. In fact, wouldn't the search for Méliès' lost films have made a more interesting story than this ersatz SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS Victorian orphan bullshit plot? I know it would have been more thematically relevant, at least, so you wouldn't have that jarring shift from MYSTERIOUS ROBOT MYSTERY to SAVE THE MOVIES.
Top it off with the fact that this shitfest is in 3D. I hate being forced to watch movies in 3D and I wish Hollywood would hurry up and get over this fad because NOBODY likes watching movies in 3D. We already went through this phase in the 1950s drive-in era, so, believe me, nobody in the audience gives a flynig fuck that you can make a fish fly off the screen. It's been done. All 3D does is make movies incredibly annoying to watch on video. Oh, but, "Hugo" is very obviously not a film made to be seen in 3D because absolutely nothing flies out of the screen. They made this movie for 2D, then slammed it into 3D at the last minute to justify jacking up the price. You can tell it was a rush job because the 3D is really shoddy; it just gives you a headache to look at it.
Let me be clear. I have nothnig against film preservation. I don't like movies that beat me over the head with a message and I especially don't like when that message is about something as wonky as WE MUST SAVE BORING SILENT FILMS. Say what you want about the constant environtmental sermons in kids' flicks these days, at least saving the planet is kind of important to someone out a small circle of movie snobs. More to the point, I would even tolerate a wonky message IF THE MOVIE KEPT MY INTEREST WHILE DELIVERING IT. "Hugo" is deadly dull, and the only way that Scorcese can think to inject some life into this dead fish is to shoehorn in more chase scenes where Hugo easily evades the bumbling station cop who hates orphans.
Personally, I find movies about the magic of cinema to be self-indulgent, like when newspaper columnists write that inevitable piece about how hard it is to think of a topic for their column. A lot of film critics and industry people are jizzing themselves over this movie because they're onboard with Scorcese's SAVE THE SILENT FILMS message. They think it's "great" that Scorcese has included a "subtle" message about film preservation in this "delightful" film. What I am saying is, do not trust the critics on this one. They have a dog in this fight.
Ask any man on the street about this movie, any man who cares about character, plot, pacing and any of that other stuff that actually makes a movie interesting, and he will tell you this movie is terrible.
When the movie opens, our titular hero is a circa 1930s orphan living in a Paris train station. He finds a broken clockwork robot that he is convinced contains a message from his dead father if he could only get it working again. It sounds like a perfectly servicable orphan's trinket plot that no one could mess up, right? You'd be surprised. After an hour or so of pointless shenanigans and endless scenes of Sasha Baron Cohen chasing Hugo through gear-encrusted clockworks, a deus ex machina randomly plops the answer into Hugo's lap. Hugo activates the robot and it reveals...NOT a message from Hugo's father, but rather that the guy running the train station toy shop is long-lost silent filmmaker Georges Méliès. Actually, no. It doesn't reveal that, it only reveals a hint that the guy is Méliès (The robot draws a picture of the famous "Trip to the Moon" scene where the moon has a rocket in his eye and sign it with the toy shop owner's name ), so we have to spend another hour following the blandly nice Hugo and his be-bereted pseudo-girlfriend (the toy shop guys' goddaughter) wander around trying to piece together the mystery that the audience already knows the answer to. Oh, great, an uninteresting mystery with no stakes where I already know the outcome from the get-go? Yeah, that's riveting cinema.
Okay, so the two kids FINALLY figure out that the girl's godfather is Méliès, but now there's a new wrinkle. Méliès can't make films anymore because of a painful secret from his past and he flies into a howling, weeping rage when he's confronted with evidence of his past work. Okay, great, a THIRD boring pointless mystery. First of all, if I were a homeless orphan living in a train station and being forced to steal bread to survive, I don't think I would give a shit that some old rich guy was too sad to make his crappy stilted period movies anymore. Whether he makes movies or not, that doesn't change anything for Hugo's situation, so I have no clue what's really at stake or why the characters are so concerned. Second, since this is the real meat of the plot, why did we just waste like a million hours getting to this point? Instead of having all the bullshit with the robot, why not just start the movie off with Hugo discovering that the toy shop guy is Méliès and move directly into the "WHY IS MELIES SAD" mystery? That would have shaved about two hours of bloat off of this ponderous slog. Oh, but this is a Martin Scorcese movie, and Scorcese seems to think that LONG=DEEP. This is the guy that made "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull?" Now he makes these baroque Oscar bait monstrosities. This seems to afflict a lot of directors later in life, when they get to that "I WANT TO MAKE SOMETHING MY GRANDCHILDREN CAN ENJOY" phase.
Okay, so what could it be that's so traumatized Méliès? I suspected, like everyone else I spoke to about this film, that it would turn out that someone had accidentally been killed during one of his shoots and now he was wracked with guilt. That would have been kind of cliched, but at least it would have made sense. Instead, it turns out that World War I happened, and people were so scarred by the death and destruction that they didn't feel like watching Méliès' goony movies anymore. That's right, his secret pain is BOO HOO I'M NOT POPULAR ANYMORE. This just makes Méliès come across as a colossal self-involved baby.
I think this plot point could be compared to the recent Muppets movie, which also hinged around a problem of BOO HOO WE'RE NOT POPULAR ANYMORE. It's kind of instructive to see how the Muppets handled the same issue in a way that actually made you feel sympathetic for the protagonists and want to see them succeed. In "Hugo," I did not care a whit whether some angry old guy -- who actually goes out of his way to be an asshole to Hugo, whom he pretty much knows is a homless orphan, early in the movie, by stealing his one prized possession and telling Hugo that he threw it into the furnace -- got the public to suck his withered old dick again.
Anyway, earlier in the film, some film historian who has a life-long passion for Méliès told Hugo that all of Méliès' films had been lost. Oh no! But then, at the end, after Hugo convinces Méliès not to give up on life, they hold some gala where the historian comes out and says "Hey, after searching through vaults and stuff, we found 80 films!" Oh. Great, so when you say that all his filsm had been lost, you mean that you just never bothered looking for them? Yeah, I see you have a real dedication to that supposed passion of yours. In fact, wouldn't the search for Méliès' lost films have made a more interesting story than this ersatz SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS Victorian orphan bullshit plot? I know it would have been more thematically relevant, at least, so you wouldn't have that jarring shift from MYSTERIOUS ROBOT MYSTERY to SAVE THE MOVIES.
Top it off with the fact that this shitfest is in 3D. I hate being forced to watch movies in 3D and I wish Hollywood would hurry up and get over this fad because NOBODY likes watching movies in 3D. We already went through this phase in the 1950s drive-in era, so, believe me, nobody in the audience gives a flynig fuck that you can make a fish fly off the screen. It's been done. All 3D does is make movies incredibly annoying to watch on video. Oh, but, "Hugo" is very obviously not a film made to be seen in 3D because absolutely nothing flies out of the screen. They made this movie for 2D, then slammed it into 3D at the last minute to justify jacking up the price. You can tell it was a rush job because the 3D is really shoddy; it just gives you a headache to look at it.
Let me be clear. I have nothnig against film preservation. I don't like movies that beat me over the head with a message and I especially don't like when that message is about something as wonky as WE MUST SAVE BORING SILENT FILMS. Say what you want about the constant environtmental sermons in kids' flicks these days, at least saving the planet is kind of important to someone out a small circle of movie snobs. More to the point, I would even tolerate a wonky message IF THE MOVIE KEPT MY INTEREST WHILE DELIVERING IT. "Hugo" is deadly dull, and the only way that Scorcese can think to inject some life into this dead fish is to shoehorn in more chase scenes where Hugo easily evades the bumbling station cop who hates orphans.
Personally, I find movies about the magic of cinema to be self-indulgent, like when newspaper columnists write that inevitable piece about how hard it is to think of a topic for their column. A lot of film critics and industry people are jizzing themselves over this movie because they're onboard with Scorcese's SAVE THE SILENT FILMS message. They think it's "great" that Scorcese has included a "subtle" message about film preservation in this "delightful" film. What I am saying is, do not trust the critics on this one. They have a dog in this fight.
Ask any man on the street about this movie, any man who cares about character, plot, pacing and any of that other stuff that actually makes a movie interesting, and he will tell you this movie is terrible.