The Polar Express: Movie, DVD, HD DVD Review (2004)

9/09/2007 Posted by Admin

Night of the living dead

(Originally published 2004)

The new holiday movie, “The Polar Express,” is so chilly and devoid of life, it should have been released on Halloween.

Director Robert Zemeckis has taken Chris Van Allsburg’s spare, 32-page children’s book, inflated it with plot elements and characters not in the original and launched it onto the masses with an avalanche of hype.

A reported $170 million was spent producing this beauty, but don’t be fooled by the inflated budget or by the colorful animation you see in the television ads. The movie’s story and characters are so flat, this sleeper car derails.

Using performance capture technology, the film uses real actors--Tom Hanks chief among them--to achieve photo-realism through computer animation. That’s an inevitable progression of the CGI movement, but is photo-realism really what audiences want from an animated movie? The recent successes of “Finding Nemo,” “Shrek 2” and “The Incredibles” suggest otherwise, but “Express” begs to differ.

What we have here is a movie whose computer chip renders beautiful interiors and landscapes but which fails to faithfully capture the human form. The children in this movie, in particular, don’t look like real tots struggling to believe in Santa. They look like waxen, undead extras from “Seed of Chucky,” their lifeless eyes so unnerving, they make the movie difficult to enjoy.

The film follows an 8-year-old boy (voiced by Hanks) whose belief in Santa is on the wane. On Christmas Eve, he falls into a deep, vivid dream that transports him to the North Pole by way of the Polar Express, a gleaming train that magically pulls in front of the boy’s house.

The Express is filled with other children needing their own beliefs recharged and it’s manned by a conductor also played by Hanks. Their journey to the North Pole proves harrowing, ghostly and fraught with danger--it’s literally a roller-coaster ride into situations that nearly cost all their lives.

When they finally do meet Santa and his ugly gaggle of elves, what they find is an industrial underworld as bleak and as deadly efficient as the one in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” More bizarre is that when Santa at last makes his appearance to the wild cheers of elves, a Zeppelin flies overhead, Nazi undertones are struck, and you have to wonder what the hell Zemeckis was smoking.

Individual scenes in “Express” are impressive and the movie does mirror the look of the book. But for the warm cup of holiday cheer most audience members rightfully expect from this G-rated movie, they should know that the film is akin to attending a wake as directed by Federico Fellini.

Grade: C-

(Also available on HD DVD)