Nothing on the surface of this movie indicates what it is really about and that is an odd choice. Hugo and his surrounding story is an excuse for basically paying tribute to, what should rightly be called, the father of cinema .. Georges Méliès (The Lumiere brothers would be the inventors of cinema).
It is a bit of a freak movie. It felt like unpacking a huge gift wrapped in an enormous amount of useless, yet fancy and expensive gift-wrapping just to find a small, but nice surprise inside. The plot tries to weave together a story about an orphan boy, Hugo, who lives in the Montparnasse train station in Paris, with the fact that Méliès, ran a small toy shop in that same train station, in the years after he quit movie making.
To be quite frank, the Hugo part of the story is not interesting at all and the boy actor is weirdly unpresent on the screen. The substories of the characters, who apparently spend most of their time in this train-station' s café, are so gutwrenchingly sentimental and stereotypic.
This "cover story" kills the movie completely. Maybe he is blinded by the book, that is the original story, but that does not work in a movie. At least not for me. So what i did instead was to skip the Hugo stuff, and look at it the rest as a homage to Méliès, which is basically what it is. It is also clear to me that the story about the famous filmmaker, is made with great love and respect for the pioneer work he did. The recreation of his studio and the making of specific special effects and tricks is really charming.
What i am left with is feeling annoyed why Scorsese spent 50% of a movie about a great filmmaker on a stupid story about a fictional character. He should have made a semidocumentary about Méliès instead. It may not have had the same superficial appeal to the mainstream, but at least he would have concentrated on what is interesting. It is a movie fan story and so it should be a movie fan story. A great lost opportunity.
Rating : 3/10