A Christmas Carol

2009. Dir: Robert Zemeckis. Starring: Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Robin Wright Penn and Bob Hoskins. ●●○○○



I arrived at the cinema for Disney's A Christmas Carol in a bouyant mood. We had just done a great school, with suitable and incisive questions, we had the afternoon off and there was a favourite fast food restaurant across the car park, with the perfect time needed for pre-cinema burgers. We paid for our tickets, and were given the snazzy 3D glasses, it all felt like going back to being a pre-teen and heading to the local fleapit on a Saturday afternoon.

The trailers were exciting and strange in 3D, even the adverts filled me with a sense of wonderment. The film began and I was suddenly on a chase through the streets of London, throwing snowballs at passing urchins, narrowly missing lamp posts and getting caught in snow flurries. Then the film truly started, and I'm shocked to say the opening 5 minutes were the best in the film.



In case you've lived under a rock for all of your life A Christmas Carol takes place during the night before Christmas as miser Ebenezer Scrooge is visited first by his deceased partner Jacob Marley, and then by 3 ethereal spirits (the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and "Yet to Come") who conspire to teach him the true meaning of the season, by taking him on a tour of his youth and failed courtship, how his relatives and employees will spend this Christmas and, if things remain unchanged, what will take place in the future.

The work may be considered a lighter novel than most of the works of Charles Dickens, it's certainly his only major work to concern the supernatural, however the key themes of inequality and poverty which dominate his work. Indeed it is the the realisation that leading an uncharitable life leads to an uncharitable death that changes Scrooge, not the glimpse into the family life of his ever-faithful clerk Bob Cratchit.

The story has been filmed dozens of times, with each version and derivative having it's detractors and admirers. What Bob Zemeckis was promising with his motion capture technology was the story as we've never seen it before, every nuance of the novel would be filmed, every fantastical detail could be brought to life.

To some extent this is true, I have never seen Ignorance and Want rendered in the film, or witnessed the genius image of letting the Ghost of Christmas past truly be a candle, whose fluttering appearance lets you imagine Scrooge's nearest and dearest. However extra seems to have been brought in - Carrey, as Scrooge, does more than his fair share of runnign through the London streets escaping the succesive spirits.

Amazingly this addition of action doesn't make it more exciting, indeed the great problem of this film is that the mystery and message is lost in the effects. Whether it's Scrooge flying to the moon, Mr. Fezziwig's fantastic acrobatics (surely even through the rose tinted vglasses of the past he would still have been governed by laws of physics) or the occasionally jarring use of pointy things to remind us the film is 3D. The insistence of upping the action also seems to come at the expence of the fun of the story, we never enjoy the company of Scrooge always laughing at him and never with him.

Carrey does a fine job as Scrooge in the early stages of the film, and has a nice withering tone, however he becomes the same old Carrey as he gurns through the later parts, and the least that can be said for his wondering accent as the Ghost of Christmas Present the better.

The rest of the cast are fine, although most of them seem to have worked on less than Scrooge by the special effects team leaving them with waxy unreal looking skin or lifeless eyes.

Overall I would say this was a terrible disappointment, with all the fun and wonder drained out by the technology. Would have much prefered to sit at home and watch the Muppets to see how the story should be told.