Saturday, January 28, 2017

The Polar Express

I was very interested to see it due to the combination of using motion-capture and textured CGI for rendering the entire film, as it offers the director an enormous amount of freedom in utilizing the actor's acting for each role in the film, and placing it into the film from any camera angle possible.

Well, I came away from this "exercise" mildly bored from the film. There are a lot of "Cool, look what we can do with this technology!" scenes that really don't add to the meat of the story for the film, but just feel like padding out a story that didn't need to be 90 minutes long, or even 60 minutes long.

What sort of bothered me about this new motion-capture/CGI technique is that the eyes for the characters just don't look or move "right", they just have that doll-like sparkle to them, not a more realistic feel to them, and it distracted me to no end.

The other thing I wasn't crazy about was Tom Hanks' voices for multiple characters because his voice is too distinctive at parts, and it destroys the illusion of different characters, different voices.

I'd suggest ratcheting down your expectations if you plan on seeing this "experiment" of a film.

I give it 2.5 stars, or a grade of C+.

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