FILM REVIEW: Scrooge goes 3D

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For more than 100 years, movies have been made in the same basic way: You put actors in front of a camera and photograph them.

Robert Zemeckis wants to change all that.

A Christmas Carol, which opens today, represents Zemeckis’ third excursion into the brave new world of performance capture, a radically transformative technique that he pioneered with The Polar Express (2004) and continued to explore with Beowulf (2007).

Starring in this latest adaptation of Charles Dickens’ frequently filmed 1843 novella is Jim Carrey, who joins a distinguished roster of movie Scrooges that includes Alastair Sim, Albert Finney, George C. Scott, Bill Murray and Mr Magoo. But while audiences will hear Carrey’s voice (he also plays the ghosts of Christmases past, present and yet to come) and see his distinctive body language, the figure before them will be a computerized amalgam of human and animated elements. And the Victorian London that Scrooge inhabits is not the usual blend of studio sets and matte paintings, but a fully realized 3D environment, built from the ground up in the digital dimension.

The film begins with a stunning demonstration of the effects made possible by this technique: The camera soars through the streets and byways of a vast, densely imagined city, dipping down to eye level to peer into the faces of individual passers-by, then flying up above the rooftops to capture a bird’s-eye view of the maze of elaborately executed buildings. The visual design stops just short of photo-realism, creating a world of convincing volume and substance that is still lightly dusted with fantasy.

“Because I can do shots like that — this is why I love the digital cinema so much,” said Zemeckis, whose credits include the Oscar-winning Forrest Gump (1994) as well as a wide range of films in styles both fantastic (Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit) and realistic (What Lies Beneath, Cast Away).

“The ability to move the camera anywhere, to take any angle on a scene without worrying about the physical thing getting in the way — how wonderful is that?” Zemeckis said. “I like to say that the beautiful thing about what I’m doing here in this form is that it frees me from the tyranny of technique, and yet I get the wonderful bonus of maintaining the magic of the performance. I get the best of both worlds.”

Essentially, what Zemeckis has attempted in his last three movies is the division of the complex process of filmmaking into two discrete stages, each more easily manageable in isolation. Rather than trying to deal with the elusive chemistry of performance on a live set increasingly crowded with technicians and technology, he has found a way of recording the actors first and creating the image that will contain them later.

In practice this means registering the performers not as images on film, but as moving data points in a three-dimensional digital environment. “A couple of technicians flew out to Shepperton Studios and started to take data on my face and body,” recalled Colin Firth, who plays Scrooge’s nephew Fred in the new film, “which meant standing in my underwear on a platform while something that looked like a laser beam scanned me up and down. I turned around and there was a kind of a gray, clay figure on a screen of me, with all of the shapes and contours. And then they did something similar with my face. They had me do a million different facial expressions while a camera took pictures of me.