Movie Review - 'A Christmas Carol'

A Christmas Carol Starring Jim Carrey and Gary Oldman Directed by Robert Zemeckis Rated PG

There are two ways to perceive A Christmas Carol. You can either look at this film and see a brave new use of technology to bring a classic piece of literature into the future about as far as it can go or you can see a classic story kidnapped and outfitted with bells and whistles that just get in the way. I'm voting for the second option. And it's to the point now, three movies in, that I begin to question why Robert Zemeckis isn't picking stories that could more realistically benefit from his decade-long obsession with performance capture technology. When it was The Polar Express, it didn't matter as much because it was the director's first foray into this new form of computer animation. More on that later. The second movie was 2007's Beowulf, which showed a growth in what the technology could do, and because nobody in Hollywood had dared try a Beowulf movie in I don't know how long, the decision seemed all the more daring. But now with A Christmas Carol, Zemeckis is again handcuffing the technology he's seeking to push into the mainstream. A more practical application would probably be good piece of science fiction that has been avoided by the studios precisely because it's so hard to envision. The result in this case is that no matter how impressive performance capture is and how we see its development expand with each new film Zemeckis makes, this treatment simply overpowers the story so that it becomes A Christmas Carol through the eyes of computer animation instead of the other way around. Whether or not the goal is to pay attention to the story, that's incredibly hard to do because you're simply too busy watching everything else. Earlier I said there are two ways to perceive the film. There might be a third: Separate but equal, meaning evaluate the effects as one thing, the story and all the rest as another. Let's try that. The performance capture is otherworldly. Again, we can chart the progress in Zemeckis' ongoing experiment, and he's very close to giving us a photorealistic form of animation now. I still can't believe animators will ever get the eyes just right, and it's all the eyes, when you get right down to it. Supposing I'm right, the performance capture will always be limited when it comes to these characters expressing appropriate emotions, but Zemeckis has already come a very long way in just a matter of a few years, so maybe the solution is out there. Performance capture animation involves first filming the actors' portrayals then going back and using computer animation to bring those digitally recorded movements to life in a whole new world. You know how they make the sports video games with athletes going through the motions wearing a wetsuit covered in diodes? More or less the same application, only with more diodes to help recreate facial expressions and finger movements. And it bears repeating: Zemeckis is really getting close, but in so doing he might get further away from Dickens. The look of this Victorian-era London is sumptuous and detailed. You're transported. But in order to move you back 170 years, your concentration leaves the all-too-familiar story and what might otherwise be a dazzling performance by Jim Carrey. You could convincingly argue that Jim Carrey in a cartoon wastes the fact that Carrey is a cartoon. Here, he plays Scrooge at various stages of his life and all three Christmas ghosts. Gary Oldman is among a host of other actors in the film voicing multiple characters - similar to an old radio drama - and he does a great job juggling Marley, Bob Cratchit, and somehow even Tiny Tim. This is not a literal interpretation of A Christmas Carol, but all the classic pieces are here, buried under way too much of a good thing.

Comments

[R. Campbell]

How about a movie review?? I don't want a rambling discussion about how the movie was made! I want to know whether you thought it was good or not!? Quite honestly I don't really care what you think about HOW the movie was made, I want a review??? When you get around to actually writing a review maybe you should post that instead of this idiotic rambling!

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The 3D helps a lot to entertain the viewer. Yet I don't think its advisable to watch for 10 years old below children. It's quit scary though.

[diazra]

I loved it, even watched it twice! It's not a flick for the rug rats though. A Christmas Carol is a story I made a point of reading every December, and it's a scary story. It's a ghost story. The movie does justice to that. But all the time, there's an underlying warmth that is so Dickens. It doesn't hurt that the audience go through an exhilarating ride of a movie to reach that happy end.

[Fun & Fact]

Some improvement has been made in that respect, but most of the people in A Christmas Carol still look like creepy robots. .

[james lee]

I thought this movie was amazing to watch. The director did an amazing job with it. I am such a big fan of the actors. Keep up the good work.
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[Popo]

This is an actor that I dont like, he is too expressive when he is doing comedy, he is the kind of person who loves the attention, that is not a humble personality.

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