All Aboard The Polar Express.... to HELL

Rating: 1/10 (23 November 2004)

The Polar Express. Director Robert Zemeckis, I love Back to the Future, Forrest Gump, Contact, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit (NO QUESTION MARK AFTER THAT MOVIE TITLE!!). And Tom Hanks, one of my favorite actors. The reviews of this movie were almost unanimous saying that this is an instant holiday classic. Ebert & Roeper give it two ENTHUSIASTIC thumbs up! Even Ebert's written review gave it a full four stars! Wow... OK... this I gotta see! But wait... the motion capture used looks really weird. Hmm... maybe I'm NOT so interested in seeing this anymore.
"Well, you comin?" says the train conductor to the boy in The Polar Express. The boy is reluctant at first, and the train begins on its course without him. The boy soon changes his mind and jumps aboard just in the nick of time.
Now, most of you have probably decided to not jump aboard this train and wait for the TV Train or Rental Express (hee hee, I'm so witty and clever). I, on the other hand was like the boy who was skeptical at first, but jumped on to see what the fuss was all about.
I just wasted $10 and two hours of my life.
I can't even begin to explain the pain in my stomach. The Polar Express was so painful to sit through it's not even funny. There's no story. There's no pay off. You sit there through these series of events and you wonder "is there any point to all this?" It'd be one thing if the scenes were entertaining... but they're not.
This movie is void of any emotion, any soul, any ounce of plausibility, and most of all: any fun. This movie is NOT FUN.
And let's talk about the way these characters look for a second. Saying that it's the same technology (motion, I'm sorry, "PERFORMANCE" capture) used to make Gollum is a real shame because Gollum was Believable!!! Photo-realism just does not translate well in this medium. You're using animation, why not design the characters to be more expressive? Or why not just film it all with real actors? They certainly COULD have. We as people know all too well how we walk, talk, interact with things. Seeing it on the screen done unconvincingly is not impressive. Caricatures done convincingly is all the more believable, as The Incredibles has proved. The result of The Polar Express now is as if they took corpses of dead children and turned them into puppets. They're moving and talking, but where's the heart? Where's the soul? That's what we're seeing on the screen. UGH UGH UGH UGH UGH! This movie is so horrible!
There's a scene early in the movie where the boy takes a girl's train ticket from her seat because she got up and left it. He wants to give it to her but you sit there going "why??!" Just leave it.. she's coming back! He of course loses the ticket and "adventure" ensues. And then there's a boy who's stuck in the back of the train all the time, and they bring him hot chocolate, but he can't come up and join the rest of the kids? And then there's this annoying "know it all" kid with the voice of a 35 year old. It's all so very disturbing.
Oh and there's songs! One girl goes into the back of the train where the lonely kid is. He's singing a song to himself. And then she interrupts and joins in! They end the song as they're holding hands, looking into each others eyes as if they were lovers. Very awkward. I won't even go into details about the song about serving hot chocolate while waiters dance around the train. "keep it hot keep it hot!" The one scene where Tom Hanks slides on his knees with his arms stretched up in the air has to be one of the most memorably BAD scenes in the history of bad scenes.
I have to stop now or I'll just kill myself. I need to watch something crappy to cleanse the palette. Yes... crappy is better than The Polar Express.
"The one thing about trains, it doesn't matter where you're going, what matters is deciding to get on."
Don't get on this one. For the love of God, I have decided for you! This is just another film taken from a children's book stretched incredibly thin into movie form. It happened with the Grinch and The Cat in the Hat and those were horrible also. But who can blame them? I bet if I took the book, The Berenstein Bears' Too Much Junk Food, and turned that into a feature film, it'd probably be pretty dull also. But at least... there'd be a story and a point, which is what The Polar Express is so lacking of.