If Robert Zemeckis hasn't quite left the Uncanny Valley behind, at the very least, the heart missing from his latest effort--what seems like the trillionth retelling of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and the billionth animated one--correlates directly to its absence of personality, rather than to an absence of humanity. A backhanded compliment, to be sure, but the character designs finally resemble something closer to artistic interpretation than to a failed attempt at replicating human beings exactly as they are, with Marley (Gary Oldman) and Scrooge (Jim Carrey), for example, rendered almost expressionistically to evoke rotten apples and hunched skeletons. From that standpoint, the actors' sudden bursts of acrobatic grace, no longer so incongruous, capture some of computer-animated cinema's wonder, the kind at which Zemeckis has grasped since The Polar Express--a true example of bringing the impossible to life. The only problem is that Zemeckis' own script isn't worth more than a shrug, and the film relies too much on its visuals to carry the extra weight.

Although A Christmas Carol is a reasonably faithful adaptation of the original text, Zemeckis hasn't a legitimate perspective on the material that lies between the book's famous passages. Without one, the picture becomes a Cliffs Notes speed-read through the basic themes of an already-short story. Loneliness, love, cruelty, happiness--all compacted into a particularly lifeless episode of "This is Your Life". A few of the director's stylistic conceits do succeed in picking up the slack, however. With Jim Carrey charged to play Scrooge and all three of his ghostly tormentors, the film implies that the old man's redemption springs entirely from within--the most promising idea to this end being the reaper-like Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come, which literally grows out of Scrooge's own shadow. (Scrooge's encounters with Ignorance and Want, meanwhile, are pitiless mirrors of his own words and actions precisely as terrifying as they should be.) What a better movie this could have been had it followed through on that sort of allegory--even if that meant less attention paid to the tassels on Christmas Present's robe or the impressions characters leave in their chairs. Is it too obvious, or perhaps too Scrooge-like, to say that I've grown tired of this kind of hyperrealism? No, it bears repeating.

Olatunde Osunsanmi's The Fourth Kind provokes a similar reaction, although it's intended with less goodwill and more sarcastic derision. Trading Paranormal Activity's demonic apparitions for extraterrestrial abductors, the film baits the same audience as Milla Jovovich steps in front of a camera--both evidently mounted on a merry-go-round--to state that The Fourth Kind is based on true events. The picture spends the rest of its runtime trying to back up that claim. Dramatic re-enactments (complete with impromptu subtitles to introduce the actors!) are often placed alongside "real" home-video footage of the woman Jovovich is ostensibly portraying: a psychologist in Nome whose patients are seeing identical visions of a white owl that "isn't an owl." Whatever this film has to say on the subject of alien encounters, the constantly-shifting split-screens--combined with a camera that will absolutely not stand still--make it an unforgivable chore to watch. Indeed, the moviegoers at my screening howled when yet another one of Osunsanmi's ponderous 360-degree camera swoops initiated a staring contest with its dreaded owl.

While the inherent silliness of Paranormal Activity might elicit a few gentle chuckles, that's because it doesn't suffer from the same delusions of gravity this humourless exercise does. Every ineloquent line is dropped with such solemn import that of course the script reminds you of some paranoid crackpot on the Internet. (It was probably written in eighteen-point font on a GeoCities page.) The performances are by and large serviceable, though Will Patton, playing Nome's skeptical sheriff, may have sent six or seven careers into turnaround with the sheer force of his own hysterical melodrama. With its attempt at Revelations-esque doom and its children being spirited away to outer space, The Fourth Kind is actually closer to the ridiculous Knowing as told by "Unsolved Mysteries"--so how else could you respond to it but with incredulous laughter? In all seriousness, God bless poor Elias Koteas for trying so hard; he's stuck in a variation on the same thankless role he had in The Haunting in Connecticut, and once again summons more gusto than anyone else within a fifteen-mile radius of this abomination. It's not enough to redeem the final product, but, it bears repeating, God bless him.-Ian Pugh

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Published: November 6, 2009