A Movie Review: Hugo

Hugo. Our hero, Hugo (Asa Butterfield) fixes machines. He believes everything has a purpose. It makes him sad when mechanical devices break.

Our young hero is also along. His father worked two jobs as a watch repairman and at a museum. While working at the museum, a fire starts and the father dies. A drunk uncle takes him in. The uncle keeps the clocks working at the train station. Soon, Hugo, is left working the clocks on his own while the uncle is no doubt taking the wages to drink himself to death.

During the night, young Hugo works on an automaton, which he and his father were trying to repair. He needs various mechanical pieces and his main target for theft is a mechanical toy shop that runs out of the train station.

And so this is where our story starts. The owner (Ben Kingsley) finally catches Hugo in the act of theft. He forces Hugo to turn over a notebook that has various notes that his father kept on the automaton.

Hugo disparately wants the notebook back. He ends up working for the shopowner and also becomes close friends with the granddaughter (Chloë Grace Moretz).

He quickly learns that there is a strange connection between this family and the automaton.

He also learns that the store owner was hurt in life and is in emotional pain. He decides that he needs to fix this.

This movie has a lovely tribute to our early film history. The movie mentions how some early works are lost forever and also that many of us just don’t find these old movies interesting. All true. I, myself, who love movies have so little knowledge of initial film making. This movie honors those early pioneers and how so much love was put into these movies.

Though the movie perhaps last a tad too long, I enjoyed it greatly. The two young actors are endearing.

Yes, this is one of those movies where the children make life right, but the adults here are not stupid.

Instead, they are in pain and feel that life has rendered them useless. The children are there to show that they aren’t useless and infact have much to offer this world.

A lovely movie.