What Parents Should Know
Parents need to know that the movie may be too intense and
frightening for the youngest children. There are
roller-coaster-y action sequences with some close calls, but no
one is injured, and there is one scene with marionettes that
could scare little kids. The "ghost" Hobo in the story shatters
into pieces at one point. Also, the center of the story rests
on a kid who is doubting whether or not there is a Santa.
(According to the movie, yessiree.)
Families can discuss what they believe about Santa, and also about the Lonely Boy and what they think his real gift was. Families can also talk about each of the lessons punched into the tickets given to the children. Why was each of those lessons the right one for that child? They can talk about the difference between that which can be proven and that which must be believed without proof. When the conductor says, "Sometimes the most real things in the world are the things we can't see," what is he talking about? What is a "crucial year?" Why can't some people hear the bell? Who is the hobo and why is he there?
Common Sense Media Review
"Are you sure?"
This is a question asked several times during this movie, based on the exquisitely lovely Chris Van Allsburg book. It's a fitting question for a story about a boy struggling with his beliefs about Christmas.
It begins with a man remembering a Christmas Eve of long ago, when a boy whose name we never learn lies very still in his bed. It isn't because he is too excited to sleep. He isn't staying awake because he wants to hear Santa. He is afraid that he will not hear anything. He is getting older and better able to question what he has been told based on what he reads in newspapers and the encyclopedia. It is getting harder for him to believe.
The boy hears a sound and runs outside in the snow. An enormous locomotive pulls up in front of his house and the conductor invites him to board. He looks out the window and it appears that his snowman is waving goodbye.
The train is bound for the North Pole and our unnamed hero/narrator will have many adventures and find the answer to his questions before he wakes up in his own bed on Christmas morning.
The boy wants to believe. But he doesn't want to be bamboozled, or "railroaded." Seeing is believing. But he also doesn't want to be a doubter, like Scrooge. Director Robert Zemeckis has done a fairly good job of maintaining the integrity of the brief story as it is expanded to feature length. The complications of the journey are well-paced and consistent with the story's themes, though the know-it-all character becomes grating very quickly. It is less successful after the arrival at the North Pole, when the expansion starts to feel like filler, particularly when a nice selection of timeless Christmas standards on the soundtrack gives way to a lackluster rock song that brings the story to a standstill for no discernable reason.
