Friday
06Nov2009
Movie Review - 'A Christmas Carol'
Friday, November 6, 2009 at 2:20AM | A Christmas Carol
Starring Jim Carrey and Gary Oldman  |
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.
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