Clearly, he’s techno-friendly. Robert Zemeckis, the director of the Oscar-grabbing Forrest Gump, has obviously not rested on his laurels. On the heels of what has been termed the ‘performance-capture’ technique evidenced in The Polar Express and Beowulf, he returns with A Christmas Carol.
Although this may not be the best version of Charles Dickens’ novella, there’s plenty to marvel at: the wondrous 3-D visuals, Victorian England settings and inspired multiple performances by Jim Carrey.
The script zooms in on the fabled miser Scrooge (Carrey, almost unrecognisable under the prosthetics) who is visited by three ghosts (also played by the versatile comic).
The 3D flashmatazz is particularly effective. Note the sequence in which the camera soars over the snow flaked cityscape. Unusually for a Walt Disney production, though, the movie is at times much too scary for impressionable kids.
On the disappointing side, some of the subsidiary characters such as the long-suffering clerk (Oldman) and Scrooge’s nephew (Colin Firth) merely come across as creepy mannequins.