Oh Hugo Hugo. How to try to reconcile the feeling you gave me in my soul with the innumerable problems in your script. Alright let’s start with the good things. Hugo is a beautiful movie about nostalgia. It’s a love letter to film history and the imagination that makes that possible. It wants to sweep you up in imagination and wonder towards everything in the world, and it succeeds reasonably well. It’s extremely well shot, and Scorsese brings a maturity to the subject matter that I doubt would be there with other film directors. Yet he can’t fix some of its unavoidable issues. For instance, the plot is needlessly drawn out because the children in this film are morons. They take an enormously long time to figure out what’s going on and once the mystery is exposed the allure of the film weakens. The characterizations are simple and unrealistic, as the script offers little motivations for actions beyond making the film more dramatic. That being said I think there’s more good than bad in this film, and it’s certainly heartwarming in spots. I just don’t understand the boundless praise or the parts of this film that keep it from being masterful.
