"Hugo" celebrates the birth of the cinema and dramatizes Scorsese's personal pet cause, the preservation of old films. That is a shot which demonstrates the proper use of 3-D, which the Lumieres might have used had it been available. You've probably heard its legend: As a train rushes toward the camera, the audience panics and struggles to get out of its way. Notice in particular his re-creation of the famous little film "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat" (1897), by the Lumiere brothers. Scorsese uses 3-D here as it should be used, not as a gimmick but as an enhancement of the total effect. I thought it was a simpleminded use of the medium. Not long ago, I saw a 3-D children's film about penguins. And as the plot makes unlikely connections, the old man is able to discover that he is not forgotten, but indeed is honored as worthy of the Pantheon.
#AUTOMATON HUGO MOVIE#
We see Melies (who built the first movie studio) using fantastical sets and bizarre costumes to make films with magical effects - all of them hand-tinted, frame by frame. Scorsese has made documentaries about great films and directors, and here he brings those skills to storytelling. you may have seen his most famous short film, "A Trip to the Moon" (1902), in which space voyagers enter a ship that is shot from a cannon toward the moon the vessel pokes the Man in the Moon in the eye. These two bright kids are miles apart from the cute little pint-sized goofballs in most family pictures.įor a lover of cinema, the best scenes will come in the second half, as flashbacks trace the history and career of Georges Melies. She is introduced to Hugo's secret world, and he to hers - the books in the cavernous libraries she explores. One day Hugo is able to share his secret with a girl named Isabelle ( Chloe Grace Moretz), who also lives in the station, and was raised by old Melies and his wife. Hugo seems somewhat a genius with gears, screws, springs and levers, and the mechanical man is himself a steampunk masterwork of shining steel and brass. His father ( Jude Law), seen in flashbacks, has left behind notebooks, including his plans to finish the automaton. Hugo always manages to escape back to his refuge behind the walls and above the ceiling of the station. We follow his Dickensian adventures as he stays one step ahead of the choleric Station Inspector ( Sacha Baron Cohen), in chase sequences through crowds of travelers. The opening shot swoops above the vast cityscape of Paris and ends with Hugo ( Asa Butterfield) peering out of an opening in a clock face far above the station floor. In the way the film uses CGI and other techniques to create the train station and the city, the movie is breathtaking. The way "Hugo" deals with Melies is enchanting in itself, but the film's first half is devoted to the escapades of its young hero.
#AUTOMATON HUGO WINDOWS#
There is a parallel with the asthmatic Scorsese, living in Little Italy but not of it, observing life from the windows of his apartment, soaking up the cinema from television and local theaters, adopting great directors as his mentors, and in the case of Michael Powell, rescuing their careers after years of neglect. Leave it to Scorsese to make his first 3-D movie about the man who invented special effects. The real Melies was a magician who made his first movies to play tricks on his audiences. Yes, this grumpy old man, played by Ben Kingsley, is none other than the immortal French film pioneer, who was also the original inventor of the automaton. His life in the station is made complicated by a toy shop owner named Georges Melies. He feeds himself with croissants snatched from station shops and begins to sneak off to the movies. Rather than be treated as an orphan, the boy hides himself in the maze of ladders, catwalks, passages and gears of the clockworks themselves, keeping them running right on time.
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