Bad review of POLAR EXPRESS

[Borstalboy]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 1:41pm

I don't know why I want this film to get bad reviews, it just seems so.....McDonalds Cinema...and I am really getting tired of Tom Hanks.



Nov. 10, 2004 | Tom Hanks as a hobo with cruddy fingernails. A set of train tracks that lead, seemingly, to nowhere. Writhing elves -- throngs of them -- with Dakota Fanning bodies and Karl Malden noses. Beware the creeping horror that is "The Polar Express."

By now you all know how the allegedly revolutionary animated feature "The Polar Express," based on Chris Van Allsburg's popular and charming picture book, was made, but just to recap: A special tool, kind of like a blackhead extractor, is used to remove the souls of real-life actors so their faces and bodies can be cloned and freeze-dried in a handy digital format. Then, a special reanimation process brings them to "life." Voilà -- the stuff nightmares are made of, masquerading as a tale of Christmas joy and wonder.

Actually, the wonder "The Polar Express" induces feels something like a coma. The main characters don't have names, just handy identifying monikers like "Hero Boy" and "Hero Girl" (the latter so named probably because "Token Person of Color" just doesn't swing). Hero Boy (his voice is provided by Tom Hanks) has just reached the age where he has begun to doubt the existence of Santa Claus. But on Christmas Eve, as midnight approaches, he creeps out of the house in slippers and bathrobe and boards a mysterious train that happens to be running right down his street.


The train is loaded with other children, also dressed in their PJs, among them Hero Girl (Nona Gaye), who fixes Hero Boy with a cool, scrutinizing stare that's supposed to be friendly and welcoming but actually looks like something you'd expect from the telekinetic twins in Brian De Palma's "The Fury," the ones with such potent supernatural powers they can make people bleed just by looking at them -- you expect his brain to explode any minute. A third little friend, Lonely Boy, trudges through the snow to catch up with the train as it threatens to leave him behind. Lonely Boy is a sickly lad, the movie's Christ Child metaphor -- he finally does scramble onto that train but then he sits, alone, in a separate car, until he is transformed by the kindness of Hero Girl and Hero Boy. When they bring him a mug of steaming hot cocoa, he tosses away his crutches and, yes, walks again.

OK, there are no crutches, but there is a surly-friendly train conductor (again, the voice of Hanks), an elusive hobo who threatens to cook up the true meaning of Christmas over a Sterno can (Tom Hanks again), and Santa Claus himself (again, you guessed it, Hanks), who is a refreshingly benign figure after all these "Village of the Damned" sprouts. Because Van Allsburg's book is so slim and direct, it serves as only the barest bones for the story here. The movie borrows the book's aura of '50s nostalgia: Hero Boy's slippers have an embroidered Roy Rogers design on them, and the train has the cozy, wood-paneled, leather-seated look of old railroad cars. (There's even a wonderful art deco club car, totally wasted on little tykes who are too young to smoke.)

But because filming the actual book would give us a movie of about, oh, 12 minutes, this "Polar Express" needs more padding than a junkie's Santa suit. So we have children crawling, at great danger to their lives, along the tops of speeding train cars; children creeping along a set of narrow elevated railroad tracks, such that one misstep would cause a death plunge; and children hanging precariously from the sides of train cars, simply because, well, it looks cool.

All of that is supposed to generate "excitement" that Van Allsburg's book just doesn't have -- because the book, after all, is just a simple fable about belief. Ultimately, that's what "Polar Express" wants to be, too, but director Robert Zemeckis just loads it up with clutter.

I could probably have tolerated the incessant jitteriness of "The Polar Express" if the look of it didn't give me the creeps. The movie is more meticulously detailed than real life is -- even the characters' eyeballs have texture. Their skin moves with the pliability of warm latex, and it glows with an alien sheen. If nothing else, "The Polar Express" wears its dollar signs all over the screen: Appliqu&eacutr;ing all that wonder on, with such tight little stitches, sure is labor intensive. And if you think I'm being too tough on "The Polar Express," you're probably right. So I ask you to look at this rapturous holiday idyll with the eyes of a child. Just please give them back when you're done.


salon.com

[Matt_G]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 1:44pm

Well that sucks. I haven't seen a good Christmas movie in a long time and was really looking forward to this one. I'll still check it out, but I might just have to get really fuc*ed up first.

[papalovesmambo]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 1:44pm

i don't know exactly what it is about this film but i have seen promos and have absolutely no desire to see it, even more so, i like you, bb, find myself rooting for its failure. from what i've seen i find the animation unspeakably creepy.

[Plum]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 1:44pm

I worried the movie would be over-padded. Van Allsburg's books are all about the illustrations- they're very atmospheric. The stories are good, but not very long or detailed. Anyone see Jumanji? He just doesn't lend himself well to full-length film adaptations, though I could see some really good short (and almost silent) films being made out of his other books.

ETA: Metacritic has it at 66 so far, and Ebert gave it a rave. Hmm. Updated On: 11/10/04 at 01:44 PM

[Unknown User]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 1:46pm

Matt - if you want a magical little holiday movie, find "The Snowman", a short British animated film.

[Matt_G]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 1:47pm

I think I've seen that one. It's an older flick, right?

[Unknown User]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 1:48pm

Yes - a boy makes a snoman, who then flies with him at night to a meeting of snowmen at the North Pole, where he meets Santa. There's no dialogue, but a beautiful soundtrack.

[Matt_G]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 1:50pm

Yeah, I do like that one. But I enjoy newer Christmas movies, too. I think the last one that I really enjoyed was actually the MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET remake from '94.

[Plum]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 1:50pm

"Tots surely won't recognize that Santa's big entrance in front of the throngs of frenzied elves and awe-struck children directly evokes, however unconsciously, one of Hitler's Nuremberg rally entrances in Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will." But their parents may marvel that when Santa's big red sack of toys is hoisted from factory floor to sleigh it resembles nothing so much as an airborne scrotum."


Oh, my god. Best review quote I've heard in a while, courtesy of Manohla Dargis. Updated On: 11/10/04 at 01:50 PM

[Unknown User]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 1:55pm

The Grinch made me throw up - literally.

[Unknown User]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 2:00pm

Beav - do you mean Jodie Foster's movie? I love that!

[Unknown User]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 2:03pm

I do that with Bill Murray's "Scooged".

[ckeaton]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 2:16pm

I second DGrant's 'Scrooged' call.

[robbiej]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 2:19pm

Matt,

You didn't like ELF last year? It MADE my Xmas.

I also love, of course, A CHRISTMAS STORY and CHRISTMAS VACATION.

[Unknown User]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 2:19pm

"And Mary Lou Retton as Tiny Tim!"

[redhotinnyc2]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 2:20pm

joeyjoe and I were watching Gilmore Girls last night and they showed a special "sneak preview" of the scene where all the waiters on the train serve the cocao - it was Horrible - really scary and very badly choreographed - when they started tapping without music it really seemed very wierd!

[B.B. Wolf]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 2:21pm

No love for Elf? I loved it.
And Scrooged IS a modern classic.
The review on CHUD for Polar Express is also not positive. But it says that there is a 3D print of it coming out which I didn't know.
https://chud.com/reviews/426

[Unknown User]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 2:22pm

Truthfully, the ones I really watch every year are the TV shows - especially Charlie Brown and Karloff's Grinch.

[B.B. Wolf]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 2:24pm

Didn't Howard Keel do the singing in that, DGrant?

[Unknown User]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 2:29pm

B.B. - actually, it was an uncredited Thurl Ravenscroft (who also voiced Tony the Tiger) who did the singing. It was left out of the credits, and Suess himself wrote letters to all the major papers in the country to try and get publicity for him (Thurl.)

[AbsolutKnight]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 2:29pm

Hey, I actually read somewhere today that when you go see Polar Express at an Imax it is in 3D, if that is what you are talking about. I was thinking about it just becuase I have never been to a theatre for a 3D movie.

Did anyone else laugh at the "Token Person of Color" in the review?

[B.B. Wolf]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 2:32pm

CHUD has simply the best reviewers on the internet, IMO. Hilarious stuff.
Thanks, Dgrant. Even as I was typing it I was thinking, but wasn't it the Tony the Tiger guy? Thurl Ravenscroft. Could he GET a cooler name?

[redhotinnyc2]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 2:36pm

My favorite holiday film is a video I have of a show that was aired in 1969 - The littlest Angel, starring Johnny Whittaker and Fred Gwynne....its lovely.

[Unknown User]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 2:38pm

B.B. - it is a great name And if you look his history up, he has a ton of work (voice) which has gone uncredited.

[Mister Matt]

Posted: 11/10/04 at 2:38pm

I'm seeing it tonight at IMAX with some friends. The Chicago Tribune gave it three stars:

Next stop: wonderland
'Polar Express' reaches for that magical wizardry

By Michael Wilmington
Tribune movie critic
Published November 10, 2004

POLAR EXPRESS' (star)(star)(star)

It's hard to calibrate magic, harder still to conjure it flawlessly, especially the magic of Christmas that a child experiences. In "The Polar Express," director Robert Zemeckis and star Tom Hanks try for that special combination of creative stardust and technological wizardry they need to bring alive Chris Van Allsburg's 1986 picture book loved by millions.

But the magic touch is just beyond their grasp, despite hundreds of millions of dollars and a new computer moviemaking process called performance capture. This movie, which aspires to be a Christmas movie classic on the "It's a Wonderful Life" level, is overwhelming, enjoyable and impressive, without being really entrancing -- though no doubt it will entrance adults and children who love the book.

Van Allsburg's is a typical Christmas tale, potently distilled on the page, about a small boy, called "Hero Boy" in the film credits, who has a crisis of faith about Santa Claus.

To resolve that crisis, something wonderful happens. A huge old steam train with a lovable, balding but Tom Hanksian conductor (voiced and modeled by Hanks), pulls into the Boy's back yard and carries him off, in his pajamas, to the North Pole and Santa's realm. Aboard the train, the Polar Express, are a number of other nameless children passengers -- a feisty Hero Girl (Voiced by Nona Gaye), a nerdy Know-it-All (Eddie Deezen, from Zemeckis' "I Wanna Hold Your Hand") and a wrong-side-of-the-tracks Lonely Boy. The Express is driven full-throttle by a crusty engineer and stoker (both played by the late Michael Jeter, to whom the movie is dedicated).

The kids go through a fantastic roller-coaster ride of a journey on this Polar Express, complete with musical comedy waiters and pursuing wolves, headed for the final celebration just before Santa's sleigh departure with a gargantuan bag of gifts, to a Super Bowl-level send-off by thousands of capering elves. The highlight: Santa's presentation of the first gift of Christmas -- perhaps to one of the kids on the Express.

Can Hero Boy's potential disbelief withstand such an immense assault? Take a guess.

"The Polar Express" does eventually cast a spell of wonderment. And it's certainly an exciting movie -- never more so than when the Express speeds through snow-mantled mountainous regions of wolves and potential avalanches on the way to the Pole, or when we catch our first sights of the amazing North Pole city, a "Metropolis" closer to Fritz Lang's than Superman's -- or Santa's.

Hanks works overtime here, providing the voice for (The Boy's Father, Conductor, Hobo, Scrooge and Santa Claus) and the body motion model for six (including Hero Boy) through the digital process motion capture (designed to capture human motions for computer animation), here refined to something called performance capture. Like rotoscoping (a technique used before computers to draw over a sequence of images), performance capture enables animators to use live performances as a model, using a black suit covered by infrared sensors, and literally puts the performance inside a digital skin.

But is that really the best strategy? As with rotoscoping, something is missing here. "Polar Express'" characters tend to be a bit lifeless and stiff, not as real as the Toons in Zemeckis' great "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," or Pixar's "The Incredibles").

Of course, Van Allsburg's original illustrations, closely copied here, are somewhat stiff or painterly themselves. And "Polar Express" isn't a longish book with lots of material, like the Harry Potter tales, but a sparsely written 30-page picture book about as long as Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are"; its natural movie equivalent would have been a short. Zemeckis and his co-writer, "Cast Away's" William Broyles Jr., have thickened the story out cleverly. But it still feels padded.

Everything in "Polar Express" that truly impresses us tends to be in the spectacular backgrounds. The child characters, even Hero Boy, and the adults on the train never blossom much beyond their initial appearance; the throngs of elves sometimes unfortunately suggest the climax of 1977's "Star Wars" or "Triumph of the Will."

Zemeckis' "Roger Rabbit" and "Forrest Gump" were both, in their own ways, technological marvels. But each of them had a richer, longer, more detailed story than "Polar Express," which is faithful to its source but stretches it to the snapping point. Will children mind? I doubt it. Van Allsburg's warming, bell-clear message of Christmas faith will still ring out for them, if not (to our loss) for some of us grown-ups.

"The Polar Express" (star)(star)(star) Directed by Robert Zemeckis; written by Zemeckis, William Broyles Jr. based on the book by Chris Van Allsburg; photographed by Don Burgess, Robert Presley; edited by Jeremiah O'Driscoll, R. Orlando Duenas; production designed by Rick Carter, Doug Chiang; music by Alan Silvestri; original songs by Glen Ballard, Silvestri; sound design by Randy Thom; senior visual effects supervisors Ken Ralston, Jerome Chen; visual effects produced by Craig Sost; executive producers, Tom Hanks, Jack Rapke, Van Allsburg; produced by Steve Starkey, Zemeckis, Gary Goetzman, William Teitler; a Warner Bros. release of a Castle Rock Entertainment presentation; opens Wednesday. Running time: 1:40. MPAA rating: G.

Hero Boy/Father/Conductor/Hobo/Santa Claus . . . . . . . . . . . . .Tom Hanks

Smokey/Steamer .................. Michael Jeter

Hero Girl ....................... Nona Gaye

Lonely Boy ...................... Peter Scolari

Know-it-All ..................... Eddie Deezen

Elf General ..................... Charles Fleischer


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