Monday, June 26, 2006

Polar Express

Possibly one of the worst films of recent years has to be Robert Zemeckis' Polar Express, his $150 million CG fiasco. I'm a big fan of kids animation, be it traditional or CGI but I've never seen such a souless film as Polar Express. The characters stare with dead eyes, the faces move with so little expression that you wonder if someone forget to turn on their so called Performance Capture technology. The film is made up with terrible sequence after terrible sequence of tickets flying around the train, the handing out of the Hot Chocolate, the missing pin from the trains break etc... Someone asked Tom Hanks why they didn't shoot this film Live Action, and he replied he didn't fancy spending all his time on top of a train shooting sequences, no but he'd rather act in a room full of technology covered in motion capture equipment. I think he seems to have forgotten that there's such a thing as Movie FX that would have made it look like he was on top of a real train, instead of a shop dummy version of him. They seem to make such a big deal that Tom Hanks was playing multiple characters, maybe they should have looked at Peter Sellers in Dr Strangelove or Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets to see how multiple characters should really be played.
Zemeckis has made some great films in the past, I hope his next Beowulf is a return to form.

1 comment:

allen etter said...

Could not agree more. My wife had been teaching this story to her deaf students ever Christmas and she was so excited about it coming out...we were both disappointed, but me more than she. I found it to be EXTREMELY creepy.