A Christmas Creepfest
Magic-less Mannequins Populate The Polar Express

The stakes are high when you invest in producing a Christmas movie. A success means that you can count on income from its television appearances every twelve months. A failure means a film on par with Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Jingle All the Way or Scrooged.

Step right up. A scary Depression-era rail-riding hobo gives coffee and comfort to kids in The Polar Express.

The new computer-generated imaging (CGI) film The Polar Express, has much more in common with those losers than it does with classics such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or A Christmas Story. Try as it might, the movie lacks that essential ingredient conveying a sense of magic and wonder. And that ingredient is character.

The main character in The Polar Express is a boy of about ten who has started to question the existence of Santa Claus. On Christmas Eve, a train called the Polar Express pulls up to his yard to take him and about two-dozen other kids to the North Pole. The movie utilizes Tom Hanks as the voice and facial inspiration for the train’s conductor and several other characters. That trick is supposed to give the movie a feeling of a book being read to a child but only confuses the issue as the conductor sounds just like the hobo who sounds just like Santa Claus…

The Polar Express is based on Chris Van Allen’s 1985 best-selling children’s book of the same name. Movie director Robert Zemeckis has recreated the otherworldly quality of the book’s illustrations but fleshing out the characters and story of the 29-page book into a 100-minute movie proves to be a bit more troublesome.

One problem is that CGI just isn’t quite there yet when it comes to presenting humans and their complex body and facial movements. They look like creepy dime store mannequins and their mouths and eyes look dead. Too often, the filmmakers just cheat by putting the characters slightly out of focus. To make matters worse, most of the kids have neither names nor distinguishing features. They are supposed to be the heart and soul of the movie but lack the definition given the secondary characters such as the train’s fireman, engineer and hobo.

The Polar Express should do for train travel what Deliverance did for outdoor tourism in the Ozarks. It is supposed to be a G-Rated holiday film for kids, but its locomotive scenes are fraught with dangerous curves, icy winds and a hobo who looks like Tom Waits. In that regard it has more than a passing resemblance to the adult films Emperor of the North and Runaway Train.

The realism lacking in every living creature in the movie is made up for somewhat by the truly impressive effects in the train scenes. The locomotive has a frightening weight and inertia that makes the first half of the movie a terrifying trip through a fantasyland where the train scales 45-degree mountains before plunging into valleys like a roller coaster. Then the train skids sideways across a frozen lake before miraculously straightening itself out just prior to reaching the tracks on the other side. Realistically we all know that the result should have been a tangled mess of metal and mannequin.

That scene is a microcosm of the entire film. Time and again The Polar Express puts its nameless kids through sheer terror and/or heartbreak before saving them at the last minute. That emotional ploy is supposed to substitute for real movie magic…and it just doesn’t work.

When the train finally pulls into the North Pole, we find that it has been turned from the quaint Arctic village viewed in Rudolph into a massive brick and steel factory-city, reminiscent of turn of the century industrial London. In a blatant nod to communism, all of the scrawny dour-faced elves are dressed identically in red uniforms—working diligently on the holiday before marching en masse into the city square for a rally.

At last Santa arrives and speaks to the kids in conspiratorial tones in a voice copped from Donald Sutherland’s character in Oliver Stone’s JFK. Then the train takes everybody home and the main kid wakes up to find it was all just a dream…or was it?

With its doe-eyed kids in pajamas and swelling orchestral score, The Polar Express aims to be emotionally manipulative but misses the mark on just about all counts. There’s not one memorable character and the message conveyed is simply “Believe in Christmas…or else!” It views the sanctity of the holiday season in the same manner that the current administration views patriotism—as something to embrace but not think about.

The thing about Christmas movies is that even when they falter, they manage to emerge from the mothballs every twelve months. The Polar Express is a stiff, magic-less mess…but you can count on it being televised every holiday season from now until the end of time. It will be shown right between Scrooged and Jingle All the Way.

The Polar Express is rated G and is currently playing at Regal Cinemas in Boone.