Are you excited for "Tintin"?

If your first reaction is to start grumbling about technology, then I don't know how to get past that.  To my mind, the last thing that's interesting about this movie is the software and hardware used to produce it.  We live in an age of miracles we take for granted and even complain about, and it tires me.

What excites me about "Tintin" is specifically the collision of talent that it represents.  If you read my piece about the San Diego Comic-Con presentation this summer by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, I laid out my thoughts upon seeing the first real footage from the movie.

I've seen more at this point, and I've seen enough to see the characters at play.  For example, I'm intrigued by the interplay between Thompson (Simon Pegg) and Thomson (Nick Frost), and I'm trying to imagine the sessions where they recorded that, alone in a room with Steven Spielberg.  You look at "Spaced," and you take into account how genuine their love of genre is, and it's hard not to take pleasure in the idea of those two guys just playing, slapstick and banter brought to painted life.

I'm obviously excited by the prospect of Andy Serkis giving another digital performance this year after his exceptional work as Caesar in "Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes," and Captain Haddock is one of those big broad comic creations that seems designed to give a guy like Serkis room to rip.

Toby Jones, Daniel Craig, Cary Elwes, and, of course, Jamie Bell as Tintin, all of them getting a chance to play around with this iconic filmmaker, finally doing something he's wanted to do for thirty years, all because Peter Jackson stepped up with a way to make this that let Spielberg just be pure 100% Spielberg.

We've got this exclusive featurette for you today that takes a look at their relationship and which finally gives you at home a look at the test footage that they screened for us at Comic-Con, with Peter Jackson playing Captain Haddock in live-action opposite a CGI Snowy.  This was an early idea about how to make the film, and I think at least one answer that you can offer when someone snarls, as I'm sure some people will, "Why did he have to make it with motion-capture?" is "Because of Snowy."  He's one of the most important characters in any "Tintin" movie, and I think Spielberg wanted to make a movie where Tintin and Snowy share a world, not where one of them or the other is a special effect.

Also, if you haven't seen the new trailer, here it is below:
 

 
That's pretty much beat for beat the entire film, but in two minutes and thirty-one seconds, right at the bleeding edge of how long you're allowed to cut a studio trailer.  If you like that, you'll probably like the movie, and if you don't, I'm guessing nothing's going to convince you at that point.

I look at that and I genuinely can't wait to see it.  That movie looks like ridiculous amounts of fun.

Guy Lodge over at InContention weighed in on the movie already, and I'm hoping we get a crack at it here in the US sooner rather than later.

"The Adventures Of Tintin" opens in the UK October 26, and in the US on December 21.  We are one of the last two markets to get the movie internationally.