Tuppence is Tuppence

When the machines take over and they all put us in hamster wheels to keep them powered, it will fall upon them to every 25th of December comb through the archives of the billion different film versions of A Christmas Carol to inject into our cerebral cortex. This will keep us happy, and having our spine pierced by large needles will keep us sore enough for a few days that any extra running would be unheard of. When they discover Robert Zemeckis' version, they will be touched to discover a film populated with robots like themselves, even starring a cold, calculating protagonist that learns to love. Their circuits overcome with emotional data, they will react logically and assume the Christmas spirit, giving all human workers the day off. We will then chase down and smash their leader into toasters.

So thanks, Disney's A Christmas Carol, for helping with the revolution. And for nothing else. Maybe for adding some variety to my nightmares.

A Christmas Carol is about a heartless, soulless, textureless, weightless specter named Ebenezer Scrooge who must combat insane ghosts who send him through a blender of physical comedy so that he may emerge a broken man and accept whatever strange traditions are thrust upon him by the oppressive London society. If I made the movie sound a bit like a Freemasons-backed fable, GOOD. We've had a trillion adaptations of this film, every year we're forced to sit through a new retread of this goddamn story and I don't know why anyone thinks it's relevant to make yet another film on the subject.

You know who should have known better? The financial backers who paid $200 million for this film. That's 40 million #9s with no tomato from Jimmy Johns. At least that would have been delightful, unlike this unfeeling monstrosity. that ranks it high on the list of most expensive films ever produced for a retread of a story everyone in the (very small, very bored) audience has heard a thousand times, but this time with extra ugly and more unpleasant, mannered Jim Carrey.

The animation is a step up from Beowulf, but I can make more attractive things on a graphing calculator than Beowulf, so that's not saying much. They still haven't fixed the problem of the dead eyes staring straight into the audience's soul, and they haven't fixed the uncanny valley movements that make them look like robots who wish to be men and wrap themselves in human skin.

And the shocking thing is, after browsing the IMDB boards, some people think this film is a "visual masterpiece". Yeah, there's no accounting for taste, but that's like calling a dumpster a visual masterpiece. A dumpster filled with dead robots who have been stealing your blood and toenails in your sleep for months.

The whole film looks like a video game cutscene only with real actors thrown into the mix like one of those games that's thrown out to shamelessly promote the film it's based on. Gary Oldman's Bob Cratchit looks like an imp that might live under your bed and his son Tiny Tim (also played by Gary Oldman in yet another of Zemeckis' clever ideas to leave my nightmares with his distinctive thumbprint) looks like that imp had a child with a porcelain doll. Bob Hoskins' Mr. Fezziwig may be the most offensive of them all. He looks like a wall that gained sentience, developed anthropomorphic features until he had the frame of a human and then started to dance and scream. The scene, where he dances and bounds about the hall weightlessly, trashed anything nice I could say about the film's aesthetic. Not only did it cheapen the film by likening it to a video game cutscene, it ruined whatever sense of weight remained for these characters and spoiling any remaining delusion that these characters might be something like human.

Jim Carrey is pretty awful in the lead role and as the three ghosts. His voice is horrifically mannered in the worst way possible, as if a Jim Carrey voice simulator got stuck on in-store demonstration. Scrooge's character design is cartoony and at odds with the realistic look the animators were going for, and since that realistic look failed he looks all the more out of place. Strangely, though, he's the most emotive and textured of all the CGI robots, although "most human-like" is pretty fucking faint praise.

I thought we all agreed after Beowulf that this motion capture nonsense was a failed experiment. We have the technology to replicate inanimate objects with photo-realistic quality, but the technology to do the same to humans just isn't there. It doesn't need to be achieved by producing dozens of over-budgeted digital horrors. Either make it fully animated or put real actors against animated backgrounds, maybe touch them with digital composition to make them blend better. It works pretty well for Robert Rodriguez, I think.

Let's recap. Emotionally traumatizing, hideous to look at, retread of a story we've all heard a million times before. I know a lot of critics have given it credit for getting the story right, but I don't care about that, and if you think about it, neither do you. If you wanted that same goddamn story you would have stayed home and watched A Muppet Christmas Carol or read the book. You don't really need a movie to tell you such a well-known story, do you? You went to see this movie because...well, frankly I don't know why I saw it, either. Morbid curiosity.

My point is a film is about the style, the visuals, the audio. This film fails to present a working style and therefore I discard it despite its using a classic story as a crux.

2/10