smerph

For reasons I cannot fathom, the 1970 musical adaptation of A Christmas Carol ("Scrooge") has quite a lot of fans. I'm assuming that nostalgia and Christmas does a lot of heavy lifting on that front. I came across it a little later in life, and with quite a few other adaptations of the novella under my belt. I found its deviations from the source material jarring, the songs hopelessly simplistic and the central performance (by a way too young Albert Finney) distinctly off.

I was about 40 minutes into this rather drab Netflix movie, when the insipid song "I Like Life" started and I realised that it was, curiously, a remake of the 1970 film. Yes, we've got to the level of laziness where studios are doing remakes of adaptations of novels. I'm a bit baffled by the decision as I don't think there's anything remarkable about the Finney film that warranted this. Even the best song ("Thank You Very Much") recycled here, is a poor relation to "Consider Yourself" from fellow Dickens musical, Oliver!.

Of course, the key difference this time around is that this is animated. Aside from that, it's pretty comparable to the 1970 film. There's the same disinterest in using Dickens' dialogue, and superfluous additions (Scrooge's childhood in this , seems to be based on Dickens' rather than the pages of his novella).

I guess some of the directing choices have a nice bit of flair to them, although I found the character designs to be incredibly bland. The narrative failed to hold my interest beyond the novelty of spotting celebrity voices.

Because this is geared towards a kiddy audience, we have the addition of an dog called Prudence. Quite bafflingly, despite being a miserable old miser, Scrooge is quite the dog fan. It brings to mind the equally dumb decision made in the 2001 adaptation ("Christmas Carol: The Movie") to have Scrooge palling up with some mice to show his softer side, pre-haunting. I guess the presence of these sort of character takes the edge of the more horrific aspects of the tale, but it just makes you realise how well-judged the muppet version is. And frankly, with that around, adaptations like this are hopelessly redundant.

The setup for this movie is great. Due to the extreme rules governing a dystopian future's overpopulation, seven twin sisters (all Noomi Rapace)are forced to assume a single personality; Karen Settman. Each of the sisters is named after the day of the week when they will face the world and take on the Karen persona. So Sunday is full of faith, Monday gets things done, Saturday is up for a good time and, well, the rest of them are not so obviously defined or developed in the limited screentime afforded them. Were this a novel, I'd imagine that the characters and their distinctive personalities would be emphasised and explained. As a movie, we're reliant on Rapace's attempts to distinguish the characters. This never really works due to the way it's essentially splitting a protagonist into 7 pieces and using wardrobe and make-up to fill in the gaps. My patience with the film lasted until around the 30th minute which was when the story ceased pretending to be intelligent. The interesting storyline of 7 sisters sharing a role is jettisoned when the charade is discovered, and the movie promptly changes direction into an action movie, with a succession of expendable heroes and a strange preoccupation with gore. I love a good action movie, but this is far from one. I quickly stopped caring for any of the characters and wish it had chosen to be intelligent sci-fi rather than redundant, low budget action.

Peruse the reviews of any adaptation of "A Christmas Carol", and you'll probably find mention of Alastair Sim and this 1951 version. Why? Because it's generally believed to be the best.

Sim is great, no doubt. So great, in fact that he reprised it 20 years later for an animated version. He's this film's greatest asset and the reason I think it is so fondly remembered. As adaptations of the classic go, I think it's up there, but it's also not without flaws and I'd argue that these are mostly forgotten due to the performance of its leading man.

Perhaps the biggest problem is the pace of the film. There's a largely extended "Christmas Past" sequence which adds quite a lot of off-text detail. Some of this is almost welcome; the makers explain Scrooge's estrangement from his father by explaining that his mother died giving birth to him. This is totally off-book, but worked so well that the makers of the 1984 version recycled it.

However, elsewhere there are extended sequences with Scrooge being lured away from Fezziwig by a shady character called Jorkin (invented for the film). These scenes seem totally superfluous and, to be frank, drag. The effect of this is that the "Christmas Present" sequence is slimmed down to compensate.

We get the traditional visit to see the Cratchetts (although I'm afraid Tiny Tim seems neither lame no particularly tiny) but there's no ghostly visit to see nephew Fred here.

For reasons I can't quite fathom; we see Scrooge's lost love Alice (Belle in the book) in the Christmas Present sequences helping the poor and needy. The intention seems to be that she never moved on from Scrooge and dedicated her life to charity instead (again, off-book). Whether the film is suggesting that Scrooge will reconcile with her is never implicitly stated, as she doesn't feature in the finale.

A further issue is that Scrooge is rarely on-screen at the same time as the visions of the past, present and yet-to-come. The scenes play, almost as vignettes. This means that we seldom see Scrooge reacting in real-time, and thus we miss a gradual transformation in his demeanour.

Fortunately, Dickens' wonderful dialogue is retained throughout the and, when Scrooge awakens, reformed at the finale; we believe it. I'm not sure the film needs the extended comedy scene with Housekeeper Mrs Dilber but, by this point, the film should have won you over.

Not quite as good as its leading man, the film remains unmissable for lovers of Dickens' classic novella.