Chris Van Allsburg's The Polar Express is a lovely little children's book, a simple tale about a boy losing his faith in Santa Claus who takes a trip to the North Pole on the titular train and renews his belief in the fantastic. It has a bittersweet ending and Van Allsburg's signature, evocative, award-winning illustrations. Robert Zemeckis' film version mucks all that up, taking Van Allsburg's simple story and stretching it far beyond its limits to fit the running time of a feature-length film. He pads the core story, which does remain intact, with pointless musical numbers, extraneous characters, visual showiness and cheap pandering, and it dilutes Van Allsburg's message to the point of meaninglessness.
Almost as much has been made of the film's visual style as of its story, but for all the innovation that Zemeckis and his crew put into the movie, the result is not much more impressive than any other CGI creation. A technique called "performance capture" was used to map animation over the performances of live actors, including Tom Hanks, who plays five roles. As a result, all the facial expressions and motions of the human characters are based on the movements of real people, even if the voices are different.
But all of the technical wizardry is worth little without a strong story to back it up, and that's where The Polar Express fails. Aside from the basic beats of Van Allsburg's 29-page book, everything else feels like filler, as if Zemeckis and co-writer William Broyles kept reaching for new ways to mark time until they'd achieved the requisite length. The story might have made for a wonderful TV special, but here it's enormously padded.
Zemeckis has always been a director who pushed the boundaries of technology, whether it was integrating live action and animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? or integrating Tom Hanks and historical footage in Forrest Gump. But here the technology hampers him, as the human characters appear stiff and awkward, and Hanks shows his limitations in his vaunted multiple roles. The train's conductor, the boy's father, a mysterious hobo and Santa himself are all voiced by Hanks, but they all sound like Hanks affecting voices rather than distinct characters.
The scenery is beautiful, though, and will no doubt look great in the IMAX 3-D presentation in some theaters, and keep very small children entertained with its shiny images. But all the shiny images in the world can't hide the emptiness of the narrative.