A Christmas Carol 3D

Robert Zemeckis has a slightly worrying performance-capture fetish. He hasn't made any live-action films since 2000's Castaway and What Lies Beneath, and it doesn't look like he's going to be making another one any time soon. His remake of The Beatles' Yellow Submarine is set to be a 3D motion-capture adventure, and Rodger Rabbit 2 is leaning heavily in that direction too, the current idea doing the round that it'll be drawn toons interacting with performance capture "humans". But anyway, I'll shove my disappointment that the guy who made Back to the Fucking Future and Forrest Gump is no longer making live-action films to one side for a moment.

There's no point in me really attempting to cover the plotline of the film, because it's been done 18 times before with Muppets, Mickey, and Albert Finney (Rhyming was amusingly unintentional). If you haven't seen some adaption of it you've clearly never turned on your TV over Christmas. Well, maybe I should cover it, just so this doesn't end up looking like I'm jerking off over 3D and performance capture, and just incase you don't own a TV.

The plot is the same as always, Scrooge is a mean old git who hates christmas and the world in general, and as such is visited by the ghost of his dead associate, Jacob Marley, who warns Scrooge that he is living his life wrongly, and if he does not change his ways Scrooge shall end up like him (A ghost covered in chains, formed from all the bad things he had done). So Scrooge is visited by 3 spirits who show him his past, his present, and his future, and thereby demonstrate how he has changed, what he is missing out on, and the possibilities of his future (that aren't that great). As such, Scrooge shits himself, and then changes his ways. It's a long, old tale of redemption, pretty much.

And that's the main downside of the film, it's been done so many times and as such there's really nothing new here other than the flexibility that performance capture allows and the possibilities that 3D allows. That's not to say it's a bad film, it's rather enjoyable and doesn't seem to drag at all, it's just ground that's been covered so many times by so many different people.
Zemeckis' reason for making the film was that it was his "favourite time-travel story", something that confused me, because let's be honest, there's really not that much time-travel in it (Infact there's none, as it's all just visions and "shadows", it's not like Scrooge actually gets thrown back or forward through time) and therefore it seems a bit of a shit reason to make the film.

HOWEVER, what Zemeckis has managed to create is something fun and lively, a nice adaption that doesn't drag. I'd say that's mainly down to Jim Carrey's performance as Scrooge, who through the use of performance capture not only takes on Carrey's voice but his mannerisms and looks as well (even if they are skewed in a cartoonish, over-the-top way). He manages to create wildly different characters in the forms of the various ghosts of christmas, as well as the different variations of Scrooge that are shown by the ghosts. The majority of the rest of the cast, including Bob Hoskins and Gary Oldman, also take on a number of roles. This allows a large number of characters to be portrayed by a much smaller number of actors, something that doesn't detract from the film as the actors clearly had fun creating various voices and behaviours for each character, something that comes across well on screen as you're not always aware it's the same actor (infact looking on imdb i'm impressed that Gary Oldman was not only Bob Crachit and Jacob Marley, but also Tiny Tim, something I didn't notice at all in the film).

There's also the fact Zemeckis has perhaps learnt from mistakes with previous CG and motion-capture ventures that attempt to portray humans (Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Polar Express, Beowulf), all of which stumbled into the uncanny valley, and aimed for a less realistic look for his characters, hovering at a point where they are clearly human but could quite easily drop into a shrek or pixar film and not look out of place. I guess the easiest way to explain the Uncanny Valley is that section in the appearance of things where they stop being a cartoon or parody or rough portrayal of human, but do not quite reach the level of what we accept and perceive to be human. Things in the Uncanny Valley lack the subtleties of human beings. All this add up to something that we reject, as we cannot accept it as it does not fall into either category of 100% human or 100% not-human. Thankfully, Christmas Carol does not enter this area, resulting in it being more easy-going on the eye and perhaps all the more believable to the audience.

Like all animated 3D films I've seen this year, the 3D was nicely used, subtle in places but more obvious in others (flying through the streets of london and over fields was impressive), with only the occassional 3D "pop-out" event, but nothing that was part of the "let's make that pop out simply because we can" school of film making that marred Final Destination 4.
My only fault with it (and this was probably due to the fact the projector blew up at the start and was displaying wildly out-of sync images complete with a nice red area on one side the screen) was that there was a hell of a lot of ghosting going on in some scenes, which is where you get a vague, translucent image of one of the viewpoints, about a cm or so off to one side, in this case the Left eye as far as I could tell. Happens a lot with anaglyph displays, it's something I've not seen before with Polarised Light. It was especially evident on scenes with a lot of depth or things largely out of focus in the foreground, such as snowfall or fixed shots of long streets with lots of characters on them, and really detracted from the scenes. But like I said, I'm going to blame it on the projector as before it blew up, the 3D trailers for How To Train Your Dragon and Avatar were perfect with no ghosting or anything else, so it clearly wasn't the fact I was using the Real-D 3D glasses I got when I went and saw Final Destination at uni, rather than using the re-recyclable, dirty, scratched ones Tower Park give to people and then collect back in at the end.

Scrooge and Tiny Tim: The more cartoon-like appearance of characters in A Christmas Carol

6/10 - All-in-all, Bob Zemeckis has managed to make a good film out of something that has been done-to-death. The various technology creates a living, breathing, cartoonish world that is enjoyable to watch and immerse yourself in, even if sometimes it feels a little repetitive because you've seen most of it before but with a little talking frog with someone's hand up his ass. In some ways it's a nice show-reel for 3D and performance capture, and a good introduction to both for people who are perhaps weary of 3D and not quite accustomed to seeing real-life actors rebuilt inside a computer... But I have a feeling that the stuff on show here will be blown out of the water come December 17th.

On a side note, Avatar looks totally and utterly insane, I was sold on the most recent 2D trailer but seeing it in 3D blew me away.