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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Herge's wartime Swiftian satire., May 27, 2002
After a string of stories loosely based on mystery/crime plots, 'The Shooting Star' initiates the formula that would become fairly standard in the Tintin books to come: the science-fiction adventure, a kind of modernist Jules Verne. A huge meteorite flying past earth splinters a large fragment which lands near the North Pole. Containing a new metal called phostlite, named after the astronomer who detected it, Tintin and Snowy join an expedition of world-class scientists to lay claim to the rock, in a ship captained by one Haddock, now unlikely President of the Society for Sober Sailors (despite smuggling crates of whiskey for the journey). Their quest, however, is pre-empted by another expedition, financed by crooked Sao Rico banker, cigar-chomping (anti-Semitic caricature?), Bohlwinkel.The first dozen pages of 'Star' are unequalled in literature for sustaining a nightmare mood of unaccountable suspense and anxiety (appropriate given the Occupation context [1941] in which the story was written). The meteor is introduced as both a speedily growing incandescence in the night sky, and by a melting heat afflicting the usually drizzly Brussels, the tar on the roads melting, armies of rats fleeing the gutter, car-tyres popping and mad prophets pronouncing millenarian judgements. The spangled blackness of the sky is offset by the dreamlike twilight blue that illuminates the streets. When Tintin rushes to the observatory, he finds the spanking, steely modern technology run by an eccentric gaggle of Dickensian relics, all black frock-coated dodderers, running around in the vicious circles of their own self-absorption, headed by the appropriately-named, anvil-headed Phostle. When he encourages Tintin to look into the giant, cannon-priapic telescope for himself, he sees a colossal spider heading towards the planet. No work could keep up that sweat-making momentum, and Herge wisely lets the narrative dip, mixing comedy (including Haddock's pathetic attempts to sneak a nagan, Snowy's incessant raids on the kitchen, and the sight of the world's finest minds keeling over in green-faced sea-sickness) with race-against-the-clock suspense as our heroes strive to reach the meteor, despite various chilling sabotage attempts by their rivals. The meteor itself is a creation worthy of Swift, soon erasing memories of 'The Black Island'. The affirmative faith in science that propels the action is undermined by the instabilities of the sinking meteor, with its magnified lifeforms (including flies and spiders) and exploding toadstools (among the book's many great visual effects, the best is possibly the shrinking in successive frames of our hero as the mushroom enlarges). The massive apples that knock Tintin on the head may be an ironic allusion to the great Enlightenment hero Newton, who could be said to usher in modern science, and the famous fruit in the Garden of Eden (like Adam, or Columbus, Tintin explores virgin land), a warning against the dangers of pursusing too much knowledge (earlier predicted by the decline into madness of the scientist Philippus); nature will always fight back, in ever more aggressive and distorted forms.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
sureal--in a good way, September 2, 2000
I agree with the other reviewers before me that this episode of Tintin, is, well a little bizarre. For example, in the first few pages we learn that the world is coming to an end due to a predicted meteor that will crash into earth. One of the series strangest and most satirical character, Philippulus the Prophet makes an all too brief appearance with his words of doom for all the sinners of this world. Well, by morning of the next day, the world has not ended. Life goes on. The real adventure begins when Tintin, Capt. Haddock and a group of international scientists go on a quest to beat out their competition and to be the first ones to find a piece of the fragmented meteor that fell into the arctic oceans. It's basically an old fashioned space race but in cartoon. Personally, I liked this episode. I think it's charmingly weird--like reading a dream because it's full of imaginative stuff: armageddon, Tintin parachuting onto a boiling hot rock, spiders that grow into the size of cars, exploding pokadoted mushrooms from outer space.... Like I said, The Shooting Star could very be the name of a painting by Salvador Dali. Still, in general, this episode is quite worthy because you do have some pretty funny and exciting moments--which is, of course, the essence of Tintin.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A bizarre, exciting Tintin adventure..., August 17, 2000
By A Customer
The beginning is really bizarre. The world seems to be falling apart. Everything is messed up. It turns out a meteor is about to fall into the earth. But when a piece of it falls into the ocean, there is a scientific race to claim the island first...Really neat, the "race" setting provides us with much amusement, and lots of suspense. Once on the island, even more bizarre and strange things begin happening... Read the rest for yourself, its so worth-while...
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