Overall Rating
  Awesome: 27.78%
Worth A Look: 12.7%
Average: 26.98%
Pretty Bad: 19.84%
Total Crap: 12.7%
9 reviews, 72 user ratings
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| Polar Express, The |
by Jay Seaver
"Robert Zemeckis remakes 'Contact', with Santa Claus as the aliens."
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When I saw "The Polar Express" in IMAX 3-D the morning of December 4th (I was trying to cram as many movies into a 36-hour period at the end of a "Movie Watch-a-Thon" fundraiser as possible and it was Boston's only 10am show), I was duly amazed by the 3-D presentation but left rather cold by pretty much everything else. Pretty, I thought, but pointless in another medium. I emended that assessment upon seeing my step-nephew NOT bounce off the walls for an hour and a half watching his new DVD on Christmas Day, despite the, um, "gentle mockery" of the movie delivered by my brothers and me. Keeping the attention of a six-year-old with a stocking's worth of Christmas candy in his system doesn't make "The Polar Express" a GOOD movie, but does mark it as potentially USEFUL.To give the movie its due, when The Polar Express is operating as a roller-coaster ride - much more literally than many of the movies to which this sobriquet is applied - with the titular train zooming through a succession of lovingly-rendered perils on the way to the North Pole, it can be an awesome sight, especially if you're seeing it on a screen six stories high and through a pair of polarized lenses. Unlike with Chicken Little, I strongly suspect director Robert Zemeckis had 3-D presentation in mind when making this movie, although he keeps the throwing things at the audience to a minimum in order to make it palatable for people seeing it in conventional theaters or on DVD. The audience's stomach lurches sympathetically when the train zooms down a hill or skids on a frozen lake, and more than one kid near me in the theater tried to reach out and catch snowflakes. When this is a movie about things, it is an astonishingly staged film whose visuals will be difficult to top.
When it's a movie about people, though, it is one of the creepiest things ever produced as children's entertainment. The kids' faces are flat and stiff, and they move like little adults because that's who plays them, with some voices overdubbed by younger actors. So you get what is clearly an animated movie, but with movements bound by what live actors can do and facial expression even more constrained. The result is an imitation of kids, but with little of their vitality and energy. It's not just that, though; big production numbers are intricate but soulless: I can't recall any musical interlude quite so busy-but-robotic as this movie's "Hot Chocolate" bit. And then we get to the mixed messages the story seems to send...
Of course, seeming to send mixed messages is perhaps a good thing if the idea is to not send any message at all, but just to tell a simple story. Here, that story is that a boy (voice of Daryl Sabara, movement by Tom Hanks) is beginning to doubt the existence of Santa Claus, until one Christmas Eve when a magical train pulls up in front of his house, and offers him a ride to the North Pole. On the train, he meets a friendly girl (Nona Gaye), an annoying know-it-all (Eddie Deezen), and a poor kid from "the other side of the tracks" (voice of Jimmy Bennett, movement by Peter Scolari), along with the train's conductor (Hanks) and a mysterious hobo who rides on top of the train (Hanks again). It's an eventful ride, with lost tickets, frozen lakes, and an unexpected detour when the train finally reaches the North Pole.
Anyway, here's my beef with what the movie is telling kids: Our unnamed protagonist starts out questioning the world around him, thinking, reading, and drawing conclusions from what he discovers... And by the end of the movie, which has occasionally suggested that the that transpire after from the time he goes to bed five minutes in to the time he wakes up five minutes from the end may all be a dream, he has learned to simply believe what he's been told. This strikes me as a character shrinking, not growing. I mean, when Zemeckis pulled something similar in Contact, it was at least a kind of clever irony; this is much more cut-and-dried. We also get the wishy-washy "Christmas just doesn't work out for me" explanation from the poor little boy, dodging the whole idea that Santa doesn't visit everyone, and that kids whose parents can afford DVD players and trips to the IMAX should be grateful and privileged to have what they do.
I could, I admit, be entirely misrepresenting things. This could be a dream rife with symbolism - the other kids representing different parts of the main character's psyche (doubt, trust, excessive pride), and the adult characters mostly sounding like his father (also played by, you guessed it, Tom Hanks) because he represents loving authority to a little boy. Even the questionable "lessons learned" part at the end might make more sense if you assume that it's coming from the mind of a young boy, and thus seems perfectly logical to him. It's just that this movie never feels that smart (and, of course, there's the inevitable ambiguity-destroying moment at the end); it never has that moment where everything we've seen suddenly takes on new significance.At least, not for me. It held the kid's attention, though, even while his step-uncles were trading jokes about it. Heck, it held my attention, when it was six stories high and jumping out at me.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=10918&reviewer=371
originally posted: 12/28/05 12:25:13
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Chicago Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Chicago Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
10-Nov-2004 (G)
DVD: 22-Nov-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
18-Nov-2004
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