If I was forced to guess, I would have said that Steven Spielberg, not Martin Scorsese, directed Hugo. It shared so many narrative elements of Spielberg movies that focus on childhood adventures, including A.I., but unlike Spielberg, childhood wonder is simply a narrative device for devoting Hugo to a chapter of film history with a few embellishments. I wasn’t interested in the first half of Hugo-I had bad flashbacks from The Adventures of Tin Tin, but the second half is much stronger though not without its flaws. The second half does help to retroactively make the first half more substantive than it initially appeared. Many characters are introduced and revisited, but unlike an Altman film, every character does not play an equally important role and are only glancingly in the background or mid ground though everyone briefly comes together and is incidentally happy because of the effects of the Rube Goldberg narrative. I was annoyed that like most productions of Les Miserables, Hugo takes place in France, but everyone has a British accent. It successfully introduced elements of WWI’s effects on daily life, but disappointed me by the lack of foreshadowing of the war to come. How happy was I to see & recognize Michael Stuhlbarg, who is best known as Arnold Rothstein in Boardwalk Empire!?! Because Hugo is a treasure box devoted to everything that Scorsese love, I’m willing to overlook its faults and would say that you may not adore it, but you and your kids can watch it together without the mind-numbing effects of other movies that boast the same attraction.