This past weekend, I was able to see “Hugo” in the theater, in 3D. The movie is written by John Logan, adapted from the novel “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” by Brian Selznick, and is directed by Martin Scorsese. The main stars are Asa Butterfield, Ben Kingsley, and Sacha Baron Cohen. It was a film I had wanted to see for some time, especially when I heard that it was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, more than any other movie of 2011. It was nominated for: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, Best Visual Effects, Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing, and Best Sound Mixing. In my opinion, it definitely deserved all of these nominations, as it is a remarkable film in many ways.

What really intrigued me about “Hugo” before going to the theater was that it was directed by Martin Scorsese, one of my favorite directors. Scorsese has built a reputation over the past 40 years for creating gritty, violent dramas and gangster movies, such as: “Taxi Driver”, “Goodfellas”, and more recently, “The Departed”. Although he has made movies outside of these genres before, such as with the romantic drama “The Age of Innocence”, he has never before created what could be considered a “family film” like “Hugo.” Once again, Scorsese has proven that no genre is outside of his range.

“Hugo” takes place in the year 1930, and is set in Paris, France. The title character (played by the exceptional young actor Asa Butterfield) is a 12-year-old boy that lives in the clock tower of the Montparnasse train station. He was raised by his father, but in a tragic accident, his father is killed in a fire before the film’s events begin. Hugo now lives alone, and spends his days attempting to fix an automaton, which is a shiny mechanical man that can write messages. He believes that his father left him a message with the machine, so he tries to fix it with great effort, though he needs a heart-shaped key in order to make it work. One day, Hugo meets a young girl named Isabelle (Chloe Moretz), who strangely enough, possesses this very same key. When they use it on the automaton, they witness the mechanical man create a drawing that Hugo recognizes as an image from a film. The automaton signs the picture with the name “Georges Méliès”, which in another coincidence, is the name of Isabelle’s godfather (convincingly played by Ben Kingsley). After some research, they discover the truth about Georges Méliès: he was not only the inventor of the automaton, but was also a great film-maker. In recent years, he had been forgotten and neglected, so much so that people believed he had died long ago. Hugo then makes it his mission to right this wrong, and to “fix” Georges Méliès, just as he had fixed machines for his whole life.

At this point, after discovering the purpose behind the film, I was a bit surprised. The movie did not seem like the epic “fantasy adventure” that it appeared to be, based on what I had witnessed in the trailer. I was not at all disappointed, however. The “adventure,” instead of dealing just with high-flying action, mainly has to do with film itself. It is, essentially, a movie about movies. Georges Méliès, for those who are not as familiar with film history, was in fact a real person. He was a magician, an inventor, and a visionary film-maker, who created over 500 films in his career, including what could be called the first science fiction film, called “A Trip to the Moon”. He also introduced to people the idea that film has great potential as an art form. After World War I, he was largely forgotten, and as a result lost all of his money. He was forced to give up film-making, and opened a toy store in the Montparnasse train station just to get by. It is here that we meet him in the film, a broken-down old man. It is clear that Scorsese admires Méliès for what he had done in developing film during its early days, and it was for this reason that he created “Hugo.”

From the very beginning, the film draws you in with its striking visuals, and with the director’s use of camera shots and angles. Using extreme close-ups of the character’s faces, Scorsese is able to express sophisticated emotions, such as Hugo’s curiosity of the world around him, or Méliès’ unhappiness. Natural framing was also prominently used in order to show us the secret world outside of Hugo’s clock tower. At times, the camera stares out of the window in Hugo’s point of view, as if including the audience in the vision as well. We witness entire scenes played out in the train station with almost no dialogue, but we still get a sense of the connections and attractions between people, and in addition feel the longing that Hugo has for these same sorts of relationships.

The recent craze of 3D animation in movies had not been lost on me, as I felt it had great potential to add to the visual elements of a film. That being said, there have only been a few movies I have seen in 3D that felt as if this addition was beneficial, such as the movie “Avatar”. “Hugo” is definitely close to the top of that list. From the view of lit-up Paris at the top of the clock tower as Hugo gazes through the windows, to the gentle falling snow that appears to fall right into the audience of the theater, to the speeding trains that appear to drive right through the screen, the movie really was an eye-popping adventure. There are several scenes where it felt as if we were being taken on a roller coaster ride. Examples of this are the many chase scenes between Hugo and Inspector Gustav (Sacha Baron Cohen), the clumsy security guard who works in the train station. Gustav tries to catch Hugo in order to put him in an orphanage, but Hugo is always one step ahead of him. Their resulting scenes are very entertaining to watch.

The effect that “Hugo” left on me, and probably all of the audience in the theater, was one of pure satisfaction. By the end, everything had fallen into place, no questions were left unanswered, and of course, everyone lived happily ever after. Throughout the course of “Hugo,” there had been everything: action, adventure, a look back at the history of film, drama, comedy, romance, and, of course, an expression of the magic of film itself. Because, as Georges Méliès himself said: movies are “the place where dreams are made.”