A Christmas Carol: Motion-Crapture (Do You See What I Did There?)

Sigh. Sigh. Siiigh. Sss-motherfucking-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh. Oh,
sorry—did you say something? I was just over here. DEFLATING
FOREVER. Who was it (and this is a rhetorical question—Robert
Zemeckis, I am looking at YOU) that decided human actors just aren’t
enough anymore and need to be replaced with terrifying motion-capture
drones? I mean, it’s only 2009! Movies—regular motion
pictures—were just invented, like, 100 years ago! Are we really
tired of looking at humans on screens and listening to them talk?
Really? We prefer computerized wax dead-face golems? Are we sure the
age of man has come to an end already? Ghost of Technology Future, I AM
SICK OF YOUR SHIT.

Zemeckis’s new motion-capture holiday extravaganza, A Christmas
Carol (did you know Christmas is here already? WHERE THE FUCK IS MY
FIGGY PUDDING?), is not entirely bad. Frequent aerial swoops through
firelit, snowy Dickensian London make my corny Anglophile heart swell.
The film is thrillingly dark and commendably loyal to Dickens’s
original: sagging flesh, rattling ghosts, empty eye sockets, the terror
and despair of lonely old age. So thrillingly dark, in fact, that the
pat dose of Christmas spirit in the end can’t even begin to offset the
existential horror preceding it. A Christmas Carol is hardly a kids’
movie. As my friend put it afterward: “This is just a story about a British man going crazy.”
“

But it’s also not great. Character development is minimal—they
clearly spent more time making sure Scrooge’s every wart and neck flap
had a realistic wiggle than making sure anyone gave a shit about Tiny
Tim.

Back in 2007, when Zemeckis released his last motion-capture
monstrosity, Beowulf, I wrote the following:

I guess old-fangled human actors are
okay—always using their eyeballs and faces to communicate
emotions and stuff (so pretentious). But what would be really great is
if you could use a camera to film human actors, and then take a
computer and scribble on the footage until the humans look like
expressionless, waxy, reanimated corpses!

There’s no denying that the motion-cap technology in A Christmas
Carol is hugely improved since Beowulf, and it can be employed in film
to creepy, creaturey effect (Gollum!). So, sure. Animate the ghosts.
Awesome. Animate spindly old Scrooge, even. But everyone? When all
you’ve really accomplished is turning Jim Carrey into an elderly
manorexic man-spider and giving Colin Firth a very big weird chin, it
just feels like technological showboating. Just because you can doesn’t
mean you should. Sssssssssssssssssssssigh.