A Christmas Carol

This is, I think, the first time that “A Christmas Carol” has been adapted to film and not intended to be a kid’s movie. This film is not your stereotypical happy Christmas flick; this time it is really an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s dark and gloomy tale, without any of the flimsy sugarcoating. Jim Carrey and Gary Oldman performed very well, but I could barely make out what their characters were saying due to their heavy British accents and tendency to slur their speech. And for all its efforts to stay true to the original story, it sure went overboard with the action sequences, proving once again that no tale is too classic and timeless to be heartlessly modernized and Hollywood-ized.

        The movie had a very dark, evil tinge to it. At times, it really was, well, a bit scary. That sepulchral tone is more true to Dickens’s book, and it makes you forget that the film is just the umpteenth remake of the same story. The way in which the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come was portrayed was a great example of this. The effect worked on me, and in my opinion it made the whole film much better. It is interesting that the movie was so dark and serious, considering that no other film based on Dickens’s book has ever been that way, and that the film was animated, and that America’s funnyman Jim Carrey was cast for the role of Scrooge.

        It would have been a bit better to have designed the film not just for the “I’m bored unless there’s action every five minutes” genre. I guess they figured that it was worth sacrificing the film’s integrity so that they could showcase the CG talent of Robert Zemeckis. Regrettably, the manner in which the characters spoke was way too much like the book for its own good. At times, it was almost impossible to understand a word the characters were saying, simply because of their strong English accents, strange sentence structures, and propensity towards mumbling.

        Overall, this story gets 7 out of 10 stars, for its effort to make a well thought-out imitation of the classic story, but having hard-to-understand speech, and too much action. It’s worth seeing, but the 3D theater experience isn’t for everyone, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.