224 – The Arctic Express By admin on May 29th, 2014

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The Polar Express is an alright book, though I never particularly cared for it myself. I really hated the way so many Christmas stories had to guilt you into believing in Santa Claus. Because, let’s be honest, losing your belief in the fantastic is part of growing up. Do we really need saccharine cartoons making you feel bad for a natural part of the life process? Seriously, when I was a kid these cartoons made me feel like I was literally murdering Santa Claus when I started to doubt his existance.

The Polar Express movie, on the other hand, is hilarious garbage. They really needed to pad it out to stretch this picture book into a movie. One of the things they added was a weird subplot involving a poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks who never gets any presents from Santa so he doesn’t believe. (They try to make the fact that he’s poor really subtle. I guess so kids won’t really pick up on it consciously, because my wife did not even realize that he was supposed to be poor. The only hint is that when they stop at his house, one of the other kids mentions it’s “on the wrong side of the tracks,” and you see a broken down car and some garbage in his front yard, which is movie shorthand for poor). But once he’s on the train, the conductor makes him sit alone in a separate car away from the other kids and he just sits there being sad. It’s really weird how they shame this kid for not believing in Santa, because, well, he gets no presents so OF COURSE he doesn’t believe. In fact, why doesn’t he get presents? In real life, poor kids don’t get presents because they’re parents can’t afford them, but in the world of The Polar Express Santa is real, so what excuse does he have for skipping this poor kid’s house? Is it because Santa is a classist asshole? Apparently so.

The main character’s arc involves him feeling bad because he doubts the existance of Santa, so then this train takes him to see Santa and then he believes in him. Although the fact that he has seen actual proof of Santa’s existance sort of negates the whole belief thing anyway. There’s one scene where he walks through a car full of broken old toys and a mysterious ghost hobo dangles a horrible marrionette in front of him and taunts him about how the kid is an awful “Scrooge” for not believing in Santa. Which, among other problems, makes no sense because Scrooge wasn’t, you know, bad because he didn’t believe in anything, he was bad because he was a greedy bastard.

What I am saying is, that movie left a lot to be desired. And I’m not even getting into the bizarre uncanny valley motion capture where Tom Hanks is flailing around like a bunch of ducks in a man suit.