Every once in a while, a movie comes along and ruins a fond childhood memory. In 2001, that meant Jim Carrey floundering around a catastrophic \The Grinch Who Stole Christmas."" In 2003, ""The Cat in the Hat"" was re-envisioned as a self-indulgent vehicle for Mike Myers to try to steal a show that wasn't worth stealing. And now, Robert Zemeckis has turned the beloved Chris Van Allsburg book ""The Polar Express"" into a mediocre movie and showcase for the emerging special effects Zemeckis used to animate the film.
The trouble with ""The Polar Express,"" and the trouble with most other movies based on picture books, is that 20 or so well-illustrated pages don't make for 90 minutes worth of film. ""The Grinch"" and ""The Cat in the Hat"" both filled up the empty space left after exhausting their source material with obnoxious prima donnas trying to be funny and dancing around in fur. ""Polar Express"" doesn't even attempt to fill the void with anything that useful. Instead, it stretches the book's scenes well beyond their utility.
What Zemeckis ends up with is a well-meaning movie overrun by its own filler that never quite pulls on the heartstrings it desperately wants to. So much of the movie is just vacant space. Its tensionless danger scenes, even the one that takes place off the titular train, are roller coaster rides caught on tape. The drawn-out sequences Zemeckis intends to be artistic are really just breaks between one thing not happening and the next. And the seeming afterthoughts of the musical numbers alternate between profoundly insubstantial and just plain weird. ""The Polar Express"" may have the most chipper song about being too poor to celebrate Christmas an eight-year-old has ever sung.
But between the songs and failed attempts at pumping adrenalin into a cartoon, there is a nifty 30-minute short movie about a magic train ride to see Santa for a child whose faith in Saint Nick would otherwise finish withering away.
It's this boy, voiced by Tom Hanks, who ultimately dominates the screen over anyone he shares scenes with. And that is no small feat. Four of the other actors are also Tom Hanks, who plays characters ranging from a hobo to Santa. He has a good sense of which persona of his is the star and how to mute his acting in one role to forward another.
Hanks is able to be so many characters thanks to the chief gimmick of ""Polar Express,"" an animation technique incorporating live action that was used to make Gollum in ""The Lord of the Rings."" But the animation crew in ""Polar Express"" misses the point of animating a movie. The fully animated backgrounds seem as drab as their real-life counterparts, and even then, it's hard to make a real-life jaw-dropping interior to a train. Pixar pulls off animation by making sprawling universes too expensive to make in real life. The ""Polar Express'"" universe is mostly snow.
""Polar Express"" isn't the hateful movie ""The Cat and the Hat"" was, but it is about as necessary. Zemeckis and Hanks made something that never reaches the aspirations the movie demonstrates they clearly had. It's a misfire all around, and a shame to see it shares a title with a beloved children's book.
