Last night we took the kids out for a rare trip as a family to see the new G-rated film: Polar Express. I don’t remember the last G film I paid to go see because it’s been a long time. In fact, it seems like there haven’t been that many compelling G-rated films to go see. The entire movie can be told in one sentence, so if you want to see it, then don’t read my next sentence.

It’s about a boy who gets on a train that rides to North Pole and Santa picks out a toy for each child. It is centered around the concept of believing which is something that sooner or later, people grow up and lose when it comes to the magic of Christmas. It is based largely on the 32-page children’s picture book by Chis Van Allsburg, but obviously content had to be added by Back To The Future director Robert Zemeckis to fill a full-length movie. Along the way there is some great animation which sometimes made this viewer think he was not watching a cartoon. There’s a scene where the train is going up and down a steep incline and it is almost like you are on a roller coaster which some other pessimistic reviewers are calling cheap video game tricks, but I liked these parts of the film. Tom Hanks is the voice for multiple characters, including the narrator, and he does a good job voice acting with a storyline that is intentionally simplistic.

Warner Bros.’ big-budget movie for children, “The Polar Express,” pulled into theaters on Wednesday with a load of mixed reviews, ranging from praise for an instant holiday classic to jeers for a huge disappointment. The computer-animated movie, which reportedly cost about $270 million to make and market, is a major financial risk for the studio and a creative risk for the new “performance capture” technology used to make it.

Our youngest child enjoyed this movie (age 11) but it didn’t get rave reviews from our 14 year old or 13 year old, the older of which saw some teen girls he knew from school in the theater and seemed ashamed to admit he was at this movie with his family. Incidentally, I don’t blame him for his embarassment. After Polar Express we went to eat at the Olive Garden, good food, mmm.

Overall, I’d say Polar Express is good for younger children as there is a sweet, although somewhat cliched Christmas oriented plotline and the overall visuals reminded me a bit of The Nightmare Before Christmas and I’m not sure if the 280+ million dollars was worth it. I can’t bag too much on holiday family films like this without feeling a bit Scrooge-like, so I’ll just go up the middle with this rating (yeah, the coward’s way out as a reviewer, I know, but I enjoy Christmas time and snow and giving presents — la, la, la!). As of this writing, Rotten Tomatoes has the film at 62% and is giving another animated film: The Incredibles a much higher rating. Polar Express is a film that will look and play as cool as a snowy evening on a progressive scan DVD player and you may want to wait for it for a Christmas release because I don’t think it will last that long in theaters. This might explain why they released it so early, so that if it did indeed tank in the theaters then they could rush it out there as a DVD right at Christmas time to help recover the expensive production. Grade: C.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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