Producers: Jack Rapke, Steve Starkey, Robert Zemeckis
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Story: Charles Dickens’ original adapted by Robert Zemeckis
Stars: Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, Cary Elwes, Colin Firth, Bob Hoskins, Robin Wright Penn

CREATIVE QUOTIENT:
A Christmas Carol by Robert Zemeckis (and Charles Dickens, of course) is an exhilarating visual experience and proves for the third time that Zemeckis is among the few directors who knows what he’s doing with 3-D.

Dickens’ tale of 1838 remains timeless. The exhilaration comes from watching Scrooge swooping all over London as though he were Superman. Surely an enchanting aspect thanks to the ghosts.

To recap the tale, Ebenezer Scrooge begins the Christmas holiday with his usual miserly contempt, barking at his faithful clerk Bob Cratchit and his cheery nephew Fred. Scrooge later encounters the ghost of his dead business partner Joseph Marley, who’s paying the price in afterlife for his own callousness. Marley hopes to save Scrooge from a similar fate and tells him that he will be visited by three spirits. But when the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet To Come take Old Scrooge on an eye-opening journey revealing truths he’s reluctant to face, he must open his heart to undo years of ill-will before it’s too late.

TECHNICAL EXPERTISE:
Jim Carrey has voiced as many as seven characters including Ebenezer Scrooge, and the three Christmas ghosts (Past, Present and Future). But he isn’t the showstopper of this timeless tale. The real hero in the unique telling of this well-known tale is director Robert Zemeckis and his newfound devotion to 3D CG animation. Following in the same cinematic footsteps as The Polar Express, the Oscar-winning director does as much as he can to take an old Victorian morality tale and reinvent it with plenty of action. Animation provides the freedom to show just about anything and Zemeckis uses it to advantage.

Thanks to its brilliant art design, unusual antique British political cartoon look to the characters, and an overall emphasis on the visual side of things, A Christmas Carol works. We get caught up in the atmosphere of joy and good tidings, shiver at the bitter English winter-scapes, and stare in wide-eyed wonder as Zemeckis flies us over the London rooftops, dipping and weaving between chimneys and down back-alleys. The 3D gimmick is very effective throughout, giving certain sequences a real depth and sense of scope and no one handles thrills better than the Zemeckis.

At the end of the screening one almost reaches out for a copy of A Christmas Carol off the bookshelf.