Hugo - Movie Review

This is a review I wrote for the website of my English school -  Voss Natural 英会話, in Kobe, Japan.

Martin Scorsese was a hero of mine when I was growing up. I was never big into action movies and I was too nervous for horror, but I loved gangster movies, and similarly tough films like ‘Raging Bull’ and ‘Taxi Driver’, and Mr. Scorsese was the king. I’m sorry to say that they were very violent (and I loved it!) but there was also great emotion in that. Scorsese films could make you care about characters that were really not such nice people. His story telling was brilliant, his directing was brilliant, everything looked amazing and he was super-cool.

One extremely likeable thing about his movies was always the great feeling of family among the characters. When the characters had arguments and fights it was like a family was falling apart and it was heart-breaking. In ‘Goodfellas’, Martin Scorsese’s own mother even appears as the mother of one of the main characters. Some of his films, since around 1999, have lost that a little, but not Hugo.

This sense of family is what ‘Hugo’ does best. The story is about the lonely feeling that something is missing from your life or thinking you’re not a part of anything. Maybe you’re an orphan (someone without parents) or a person without a partner to love or maybe you’re someone who lost something that you were passionate about.

There is a strong emotional connection between the character Hugo and an old man who works in a toy shop in a train station, where Hugo lives. When the story starts, we don’t really understand this connection but we can feel that it’s important and we find out that the reason for it is linked to a mechanical man which Hugo and his father were repairing. Slowly, emotional connections form between all the main characters in the story and we even start to care about the bad characters, just like in the Scorsese movies I loved growing up. This is not one of Scorsese’s tough films however; it’s a children’s film, but it’s an emotional and intelligent film which has been lovingly made.

Everything that you see here looks beautiful and even the sound makes good use of the space in the cinema. The thing I was most pleased about, visually, was how Hugo used 3D. With lots of modern 3D films, the directors don’t think about 3D while they’re shooting. But in Hugo you can see that Martin Scorsese has put effort into making 3D a part of the film. It’s one of the few 3D films in which the effect really adds to the atmosphere and brings you closer to the story. One film review from Anrew O’Hahir, on Salon.com, said “I’ve seen the future of 3-D moviemaking, and it belongs to Martin Scorsese”. I agree. This isn’t an action movie, so there’s no explosions coming out of the screen, but the 3D is used to tell the story. For example, close up face shots bring us closer to the character and in one scene we can see specks of dust floating around in the sunlight.

Film and its history are a big theme in Hugo and everyone who knows about Martin Scorsese knows how much he loves cinema. With that in mind, Hugo is a film that he should be very proud of. Magic is another theme and Hugo is a magical, heart-warming story and a beautiful production. It’s something that can be enjoyed by both children and adults, hopefully for a long time to come.

Hugo is in cinemas in Japan now, so please go and see it while you have the chance. I loved it!