It was apparent when the final plot twists are revealed, late though they were, that Scorsese was truly inspired by Georges Méliès. I realized this as I watched the last 20 minutes of this film, which I loved. The possibility of a deep, engaging look at the dawn of film would have been an excellent concept for a film, and doing it through the medium of a children’s movie might help teach the younger generations about where the industry got started. This brings me to what is so frustrating about Hugo. This would not have been an issue, except for the film’s aforementioned strange pacing Scorsese’s time showing the audience his passion for the industry’s first visionaries is crammed into the twilight of the 2 hour 6 minute runtime when it should have been spaced more elegantly in the lead-up to the emotional conclusion. What Scorsese did in Hugo was instead take numerous pieces of footage from early filmmakers’ seminal films and insert them into his own. JJ Abrams masterfully did this in Super 8, where he used imagery, plot devices, and characters that evoked older films such as Stand By Me and E.T. However, there is a clear definition of homage according to : homage – noun, respect or reverence paid or rendered. What has been called Martin Scorsese’s “love letter” to the films of yore falls short of what features such as Super 8 have achieved in the past. A simple Wikipedia search on Invention of Hugo Cabret finds that the genre of that piece is “historical fiction,” and not, as you might expect, “science fiction/fantasy.” This is old news to those of you who have read the graphic novel which Hugo is based on.
Some amount of adventure does occur, but nothing on the scale of a true family fantasy film (e.g. Hugo takes place almost exclusively inside a train station in Paris, France. I must begin this review by dispelling one of the major misconceptions about this film: those of you who have been led to believe that Hugo is a “steampunk fantasy adventure” (as one friend described it) will be sorely disappointed.
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