A Christmas Carol - A Movie Review

By Moira Sullivan

Dickens's A Christmas Carol is time honored and countless renditions of it have been created year after year especially for the holiday season. Burney Mattison's Mickey's Christmas Carol was made in 1983 where Mickey Mouse plays Bob Cratchitt and Donald Duck is Scrooge. This year Disney has trotted out Robert Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol. Dicken's story is of course ridden with moral lessons and warnings of doom, and to learn them Scrooge is taken to the present, past and the future to personally witness his glaring character defects. But it is nevertheless still entertaining to watch this story in 3D which is the best possible viewing condition, and sovereign if its an IMAX theater.
The voices of Scrooge at all ages is Jim Carrey, but he also is behing the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. Still it is really difficult to identify his voice for so clever is the work. But when it comes to Bob Cratchet and Scrooge's only love Belle, both of the characters look like Gary Oldman and Robin Wright Penn who do the voices. The 3D experiences makes you feel like it is really snowing, and the catapults in time are invigorating. But although it is always interesting to find out what Scrooge was like before money ruined him, the different Ghosts are not at all enchanting. The Ghost of Christmas Past is the best of them all, a flickering flame that looks like a pencil head. less captivating is the Ghost of Christmas Present, an enormous Viking that laughs through most of his lines. It is therefore not hard to conjure up Jim Carrey at this point, laughing his head off. And the grim reaper Ghost of Christmas Future is the same old hooded goblin. The flow of the film is engaging, save for the period before Scrooge meets the Ghost of Christmas Present which is slow and uneventful. It is a real plus that Disney has updated this classic into today's state of the art movie magic and it is this reinvention that makes Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol a good cinema experience.

© 2009 - Moira Sullivan- Air Date: 12/16/09
Movie Magazine International