Polar Express

Christmas Eve, babysitting my 2-yr-old grand-daughter and she wanted to watch the movie Polar Express. And the sound had to be turned way down so we wouldn’t disturb her month-old brother’s nap.  I had never seen the movie, you can’t lipread computer-generated characters, so I figured out what it was about just from the actions.  Here’s my version.

It starts with a kid who is awake at midnight on Christmas Eve. A huge train pulls up and he is asked to climb aboard.  They were rounding up Republicans, no doubt. Republicans get into politics with little experience because they have a life without it, so they were symbolized by children.  Awake at midnight—that meant he was worrying about his business, no doubt.  The conductor was the head bureaucrat who handed him a food stamp, so he could get on the gravy train for a life of cradle-to-grave security.  They had rounded up a number of Republicans, an Afro-American girl and a smart-ass kid and another who can’t trust the bureaucracy.  I mean they weren’t perfect people, just all individuals. 

The bureaucrats seem determined to make the train crash.  The engineer and fireman are a couple of bozos who  act like DMV employees who suddenly confront panic.  They try to run the train off the fiscal cliff and then take it into the abyss of debt, but each time the Republicans save the day with trepidatious acts, but complete common sense.  Likewise the R’s help each other, the way normal good-hearted people do. At one point they stop a certain crash into a herd of Independents, i.e. reindeer standing on the tracks. There’s also a good angel who saves them from time to time, dressed as a hobo who disappears after each near-disaster.  We never do see God and so we don’t know what party he belongs to, but Santa Claus is definitely a Democrat. And finally they arrive at his  headquarters of the State.

All the citizens of the State headquarters wear the same red clothes, like little socialist elves.  They turn out in mass to herald the head narcissist, Santa.  I guess the goal was to get the R’s to assimilate with the elfin Dems, but it doesn’t work.  The Republican kids wander off to find the secret underground where all the children of the world are watched and labeled as naughty or nice.  They walk by the vacated factories and finally manage to embed themselves in Santa’s bag of handouts.  In the end, the main character collects a bell that has fallen off Santa’s sleigh and tries to do maintenance.  Finally, the R’s are escorted back to the train as unconvertible and sent home.  They get their food stamps punched with labels like “lead” and “believe” which is exactly what a Republican does when called upon.  The main character kid receives the single bell he found from the narcissist-in-chief’s sleigh as a lame thank you for his efforts.  Nonetheless, he smiles in the acknowledgement of knowing that he had saved his country.  And that’s about all an R needs, of course.

So in the end, I suppose I really did like the movie, muted and all.  It tells an important tale about hanging in there, working hard, doing heroic things and even if we are outnumbered, we have a bell to ring for America.