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DIRECTED BY: Robert Zemeckis
FEATURING: Tom Hanks, Nona Gaye, Eddie Deezen, Michael Jeter, Peter Scolari, Daryl Sabara
PLOT: A boy on the verge of abandoning his belief in Santa Claus is visited by a magical train that whisks him away to the North Pole, but the journey is filled with perilous diversions.
COMMENTS: There are two characteristics define Robert Zemeckis’ career: an eagerness to push the boundaries of visual effects technology, and an affection for frenetic, breakneck action. Sometimes the pendulum swings more in one direction than the other, but every now and then a Who Framed Roger Rabbit comes along to provide a healthy dose of both. So on the one hand, it is utterly unsurprising that Zemeckis would be captivated by the boundless potential of motion-capture CGI animation to deliver the kind of non-stop, eye-popping visuals that have always been impossible to realize in live action. On the other hand, it’s completely baffling that the property with which he would christen this new era would be the Caldecott award-winning children’s classic “The Polar Express.”
In fairness, it’s not a mystery that someone would come along to take a stab at turning this small book into a big motion picture. After all, Chris Van Allsburg draws cinematically. His page-wide illustrations capture action and emotion in an artistic splurge, summing up minutes of action and dialogue in single images, like oil pastel versions of Cindy Sherman photos. Building out from those lush Van Allsburg drawings probably felt instinctive, far more than other children’s book adaptations that expanded waaaaay beyond their source material, often to their detriment. There’s something very sweaty about the way absolutely nothing goes right for our Hero children, ladling on complications to make everything so much more EXCITING; but that’s not even the film’s greatest drawback. Rather, the problems arise when Zemeckis deploys his fantastic tech, which he has so often done in service of his story: shoehorning Forrest Gump into history, for example, or placing viewers in an impossible perch above Philippe Petit in The Walk. Here, though, the story is buried in spectacle, and repeated efforts to pad out the characters and give them more heft only make the spectacle push back harder. In The Polar Express, CGI beats Van Allsburg’s book into submission.
The movie wants to bedazzle you into a state of exhaustion. A raucous dance number in which flat-faced acrobats ricochet off the ceiling while singing the virtues of hot chocolate is aimed more at demonstrating the physics-defying capabilities of the technology than actually enchanting the children on the train. It’s immediately followed by the extended journey of a wayward train ticket, which takes a rollicking tour outside of the locomotive, floating through a pack of snarling wolves, flitting through a snowy forest, nearly becoming dinner for a flock of newly hatched eagles, before finally returning to the train compartment, all in an elaborate one-take that is Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE POLAR EXPRESS (2004)