CGI is, above all else, a tool. Overuse it, or use it the wrong way, and it can affect your movie in only a negative way. Use it correctly, and there's even a chance your audience won't even notice it's been done. Sometimes, this particular tool has been used to create entire worlds from scratch, which no doubt save filmmakers money in trying to recreate sets. Done right, this worldbuilding can be incredibly impressive and dazzling. George Lucas has perhaps been the most famous of moviemakers to take advantage of this technology, with the various Star Wars prequels showcasing vast alien landscapes instead of more remote parts of Tunisia or Norway filling in for various planets.
Why then did I feel the opening few minutes of Martin Scorsese's 2011 movie Hugo far outstripped anything Lucas' production company has ever done along those lines? Especially since all Scorsese was trying to do was recreate 1920s Paris?
Possibly because audiences don't expect this sort of razzle-dazzle from the man who directed gritty movies like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, or even more recent, fairly low-tech all-told features like The Departed and Shutter Island. There probably has been some CGI in a few of Scorsese's films, but nothing on the scale of the zooming around of the Paris train station that opens what would be Scorsese's foray into family films.
It's more than that, of course. The story of a young orphan boy, living in the train station and keeping the clocks running and happens to find former magician/filmmaker Georges Melies reduced to near poverty selling wind-up toys out of the station isn't the sort of thing that attracts the kids these days. Maybe if a few of those automatons talked, but even the robo-man Hugo's been trying to rebuild only draws a very elaborate picture. This movie is a celebration of the movies, what they do for people and the wonder that can come from just being transported to another world. This is a movie where the closest we have to a villain is Sacha Baron Cohen's nameless station inspector, and even he is painted in a sympathetic way with his creaky knee brace and unrequited love for a flower vendor.
The main plot has Hugo trying to repair a robot his clockmaker father brought home one day. His father (Jude Law) died suddenly in a fire, and Hugo was more or less adopted and subsequently abandoned by his drunken uncle (Ray Winstone). An orphan like himself would probably be sent away to an orphanage, and the station inspector is the kind of guy who will bust an orphan for going through a discarded bag looking for food, so he stays hidden and lets people think Uncle Claude is still running the clocks despite the fact the man's been gone for a very long time. He sees the toymaker from afar, and swipes little bits and pieces until he's caught, then does what he needs to to get his father's notebook back from the man he doesn't know is responsible for many a silent movie classic. Indeed, Hugo loves the movies and introduces the man's niece to them while rhapsodizing about his father's favorite, the famous Melies feature in which the man in the moon gets a rocket to the eye.
Will Hugo fix the machine, realize his new boss is the long-since-believed dead Melies, re-inspire the man, get out of poverty, and land on his feet? Of course he will. That's not the point, though. It's the journey in movies like this, not the destination.
A special note on Cohen's French policeman: as with here and his role in Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby, he has a very nice way of doing a comedic French accent, on par with the one the late Peter Sellers had used as Inspector Clouseau. It's a bit of a shame the makers of the remake of that series didn't hire him instead of Steve Martin, a funny man in his own right, but not in the way Cohen inhabits his various foreign caricatures.
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