A young boy who doubts that Santa Claus actually exists goes to bed on Christmas Eve, just as a large steam train pulls up in the snow outside his bedroom. Ushered aboard by a kindly-looking train conductor, he finds he is with other children and that the train is on its way to a magical rendezvous at the North Pole. In addition to the conductor the boy also meets a young girl who isn’t at all overawed by the train and its’ magical journey, a cheerful hobo who is hitching a ride on the train roof, and a young boy from what he has always been told is the wrong side of town. The train flies through blizzards, storms and gets involved in a roller-coaster ride before reaching its’ final destination - The North Pole. Everyone leaves the train but the three youngsters, the two boys and the girl, get separated from the others and make their own way through the snow, eventually arriving at Santa’s workshop and ending up in his huge sack of presents. Santa arrives but the boy who doesn’t believe in him can’t actually see him until he decides he does believe. Santa gives him his first Christmas present, a sleigh bell, and the ringing of the bell tells them its’ time to go home and have a real family Christmas.
Review:
Robert Zemekis’ films have sometimes more emphasis towards the technical (i.e. the digital effects in
Forrest Gump) than characterisation, and by using the US children’s classic
The Polar Express as a jumping-off point for a feature film he is allowed a bizarre combination of essentially a live-action film overlayed totally by CGI, which is not exactly as groundbreaking as the producers may claim. By adapting the book which is, in essence, a very small work and more a picture book than any work of text Zemekis has used a motion capture system in which the actors act their roles and are then overlayed by CGI, allowing Tom Hanks to play several versions of himself, all of which naturally look like rather like Tom Hanks. But this is in no way a new technique, even being used at feature length in Ralph Bakshi’s animation version of
The Lord Of The Rings where, by rotoscoping, the entire film was filmed live action, with hoards of extras in cardboard armour, the footage being then traced, coloured and re-filmed. Is
The Polar Express, rumoured budget $145 million, really anything more than a hi-tech reworking of this? Zemekis knows what is visually impressive, and the train’s swoops and dives, especially in the rollercoaster sequences, are truly thrilling, but with the film also being made for IMAX and IMAX-3D systems one has to think that Zemekis is juggling too many balls at once, making the ‘standard’ version of
Polar Express almost a diminished version. One is impressed with the sheer technical expertise shown in almost every frame, but given the amount of CGI in every single frame why even bother with actors at all? Glossy, slick and frighteningly professional,
The Polar Express is a purely commercial exercise designed to wring the coffers out of every possible format, but then, so is Christmas itself....
