‘The Polar Express’ is a film that still feels faintly shocking, even two decades after its release. When I first saw it in 2004, the motion-capture animation already seemed to be arriving from the future. Today, when AI can generate eerily convincing human faces, it’s clear just how far ahead of its time Robert Zemeckis was. Technologically, it remains extraordinary.

What really grips you, though, is the sheer sense of awe. Like ‘The Snowman’, this is a child’s nocturnal journey into wonder. A young boy who doubts the existence of Santa Claus is whisked away just before midnight on a vast, old-fashioned train bound for the North Pole. Whether he’s asleep or awake is never entirely clear – and that ambiguity is part of the magic, at least at first.

The journey itself is breathtaking. This isn’t gentle Christmas whimsy; it’s closer to a rollercoaster ride. The train hurtles across frozen landscapes, skids across ice-covered tracks, and at one point appears to crash and slide across a frozen lake before somehow finding the rails again. You don’t need 3D glasses to feel immersed – it’s visceral, almost overwhelming.

There’s also a powerful nostalgia at work. Zemeckis clearly knows his cinema history. The image of a train charging straight toward the audience recalls the earliest days of film, when audiences famously recoiled from oncoming locomotives. One particularly lovely sequence follows a lost ticket as it floats through icy air – echoing the drifting feather from ‘Forrest Gump’, another Zemeckis film – carried by wolves, birds, and chance, before miraculously returning to its owner.

But for all its technical brilliance, ‘The Polar Express’ is also relentlessly sentimental. Like Zemeckis’s later film ‘Here’, it leans hard into schmaltz. The boy isn’t invited to believe – he’s bludgeoned into it. Santa’s existence is proven beyond doubt, and the film never allows the possibility that this might all be a dream.

There’s something faintly unsettling about that certainty. Children who doubt – or are simply agnostic about Santa – are effectively taken from their beds, transported to the North Pole, shown incontrovertible proof, and sent home enlightened. It’s magical, yes – but also a little coercive, even creepy.

So while ‘The Polar Express’ remains a dazzling technical achievement and an immersive cinematic experience, it left me feeling oddly hollow. Brilliant to look at, astonishing to ride along with – but emotionally, for all its insistence on belief, it feels strangely empty.