The Polar Express

Robert Zemeckis has always been a really frustrating director for me. Back To The Future is an undisputed classic, and I think Who Framed Roger Rabbit is one of the greatest films in cinema history. And yet Forrest Gump is in the bottom five of all movies I've ever seen, and the second Back To The Future outright stinks. I think The Polar Express is also a misfire. I tried to be as fair as possible when watching it, and it's not a terribly put-together movie, but I tried to understand the reasons I didn't like it as it was going. I wanted to see if my built-in prejudices about stuff like this wasn't unfairly coloring my opinion.

For one thing, I did not see or review this movie at Christmas-time. I AM a great believer in the Spirit of Christmas. Is it possible I would view this movie more favorably if I were more in the spirit of things?

I also notice that I've been watching a LOT of movies on streaming lately. It used to be I almost always gave movies I viewed a positive review simply because I didn't see many of them. They were special so I always enjoyed them on some level. I saved my most scathing stuff for TV reviews. Is it possible in being able to watch so many movies at my fingertips, the magic and novelty of the experience has worn off?

I thought about both of these things, and I am pretty sure I wouldn't have loved the movie anyways. The subtext bugged me (which frankly is a weird complaint for a kids movie so maybe you shouldn't take that specific gripe from me too seriously). The bigger complaint is that the character animation looks super creepy and unnatural, and it looks SO bad that I never got past it. I think the characters from Avatar, a movie whose visual effects people swear by looks outright awful in this specific respect, so you can guess how disturbed I am by Zemeckis's early use of the motion capture technology if I thought Cameron's experienced hand did nothing but bad things with it. It looks really bad, and I had this creeped out feeling during the entire film. Especially creepy is that not every single kid is voiced by a kid. The Know-It-All is inexplicably voiced by Eddie Deezen, whose voice coming out of that specific character makes him creepier than all the other characters put together.

I mentioned I disliked the subtext.

I actually kind of dig movies based on faith and belief in the unknown. The problem is that the Santa Claus myth is a verifiable real-world lie, so there is no positive message in getting a skeptical kid on-board with it. In this movie's absolute defense, it at least didn't try to concoct elaborate-seeming ways the idea COULD be true. It's portrayed as magical nonsense, which is better than the level of "reality" the awful Arthur Christmas and Prep & Landing tried to give the scenario. But the truth is the only recent Santa story I've dug is Netflix's "Klaus" precisely because they don't attach any of the whys and hows to Santa's origin story. But this is definitely nowhere near as good as that. It's kind of cheesy and sucky.

I sort of appreciated the ticket being blown off the train and coming back, because it told us that nothing on this adventure is not going to go off as the Conductor and Santa actually planned. But while that's interesting (as is the Hobo on the top of the train finding Hero Boy's disbelief in ghosts "interesting") I think my problem is it sort of robs the movie of stakes a bit. Sure, Hero Boy doesn't know the game is rigged in his favor. But the life-threatening situations aren't actually tense if you know things are actually already being sorted out by a combo of Fate and Father Christmas.

Also nobody being really given proper names (except for Lonely Boy being Billy) is the kind of minutia that almost always bugs me. A movie has to be pretty far out there to make me forgive it (see "mother!"). Otherwise, I just find it pretentious. And if nobody knows anybody's names, they aren't really friends. If this experience really made them friends, they'd be exchanging names and phone numbers. Friends aren't really people you'll never, ever see again. By definition.

So that's my review of "The Polar Express", written after seeing it in March. Was I too harsh? Or does my lack of Christmas spirit simply make me see the movie clearer? I'm actually not really sure. **1/2.