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.
#Hugo movie reviews for kids 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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