Review of A Christmas Carol (1938) by Chads — 13 Nov 2009

Motion capture captures terror. Everything looks dead on the screen, especially the people, so the sterility of the technology support the scenes where warmth is in absence. (That's why Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim don't quite come across; they're supposed to be warm bodies with warmth.

) The whole sequence leading up to Ebenezer Scrooge's visitation by The Ghost of Christmas Past contains more dread than most live-action films centered around haunted houses. You understand Scrooge's need to keep a fire going in the fireplace.

It's not so much the snow, but the depth of his loneliness, communicated by the pot of thick soup he eats with a wooden serving spoon. There's no woman's touch in this house, no domesticity, no need for a plate and utensils.

The flames can't lick the unreachable cold that has a deep freeze on his heart. Maybe the haunted house tropes work in "A Christmas Carol" because Scrooge's desolation is two-fold.

Alone in a mansion, and alone in life, the old man realizes that nobody will mourn him, and this fact scares him more than the moving bells, the rattling chains and the dragging sounds of weights, instigated by his old partner Marley, who looks like hell and probably came from hell, too.

The Ghost of Christmas Past is a candle. Perfect. A candle provides illumination on the events that are responsible for Scrooge's tortured incarnation. Why did he let the love of his life go? Unfortunately, there's a scene missing, which would explain how money helped him overcompensate for a lonely childhood, to a point where greed superseded his ability to give and receive love.

This flaw is more forgivable than the flaw of gratuitous action, so prevalent in the Ghost of Christmas Future section, and skewers the story in favor of 3D effects over fidelity towards the Charles Dickens novella.