Is A Muppet Christmas Carol still the best adaptation of Charles Dickens’ popular Christmas novella? Or will the new BBC/FX adaptation take its place?

I cannot keep this charade up for long. It won’t. This latest of many adaptations of A Christmas Carol, written by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, leans heavily into the ghost story elements of this classic Christmas tale. The number one goal of this adaptation is to be as dark as humanly possible. The second goal is to be as long as humanly possible. I believe we were almost an hour into the movie before we even meet any of the ghosts.

Because of this, I would honestly consider this film a retelling rather than an adaptation. To add length and grit and darkness, this version reimagines many of the major plot points of the story. There’s a whole back story for Jacob Marley’s ghost and his motivations, which is something NO ONE ASKED FOR EVER. There’s a subplot for Martha Cratchit, which is… fine, I guess. Scrooge’s backstory is fleshed out a lot more. For instance, did you know he’s a One Thousand and One Nights fanboy? Well. He is now.

Anyway, let’s just run this thing through the handy dandy Christmas movie scoring system and be done with it.

Romance: 2/10. As much as Ebenezer Scrooge (Guy Pierce)’s backstory is fleshed out, the one thing we get even less of is Scrooge’s brief romantic relationship with Belle. We get a little clip show of the life Scrooge might have had had he pursued a marriage with this woman: kids, family meals, etc. But in those clips, there’s very little in the way of romance. And we get the sense that Scrooge is essentially asexual. He all but says it when he has the opportunity for a sexual encounter and says that he’s not interested in that kind of thing anymore.

Of course, there’s no problem with having an asexual character in your movie, but we’re talking about romantic content here. And there was very little. How could this movie be #GRITTY if it allowed for love?

Morality: 8/10. Of course, this is a story we all know, and we know that the central purpose of this story is a tale of morality and redemption. It isn’t a spoiler to say that Ebenezer Scrooge must learn to put others before himself and before money in order to redeem himself by the end of the story. If this movie didn’t follow through with it, then it wouldn’t be A Christmas Carol. The only problem? While the story itself values kindness and love over money and self-gratification, the tone of this film seems to say otherwise. More on that later.

Music: 7/10. The music was fine… There was a lot of ambient Victorian movie music. And there were carolers. These six points are fore the Carolers, because people walking up to your door to sing Christmas music is pretty dang Christmassy.

Christmas Spirit: 8/10. I have to say… it’s A Christmas Carol, which is basically the definition of Christmas Spirit. Maybe Charles Dickens INVENTED Christmas Spirit. So it would be weird to rank this movie low in this category. There’s snow everywhere. There are Christmas decorations. There are, as I said already, CAROLERS. There are family dinners where people wax poetic about how appreciative they are of each other. It’s very Christmassy in that regard. And yet… again, in this movie’s desperate attempt to be gritty, it loses a lot.

Warmth: 3/10. And that’s where we get to the warmth. Or lack thereof. This movie seems at odds with its own message. The story itself critiques exploitation for the sake of money, and yet this movie includes a lot of purposefully shocking material in the hopes of getting people to tune in. Dickens’s novella is a short, tight, and simple story of redemption and Christmas spirit. This movie is a bloated nearly three-hour explosion of a movie that allows for a lot of extra commercial time. The original novel was also definitely meant to be a family-friendly story. This movie is not only not for the whole family, but it’s advertising itself as not-for-the-family as a selling point. Hallmark Christmas movies are now on our shit list (please note I rated Mistletoe and Menorahs before the Hallmark fiasco), so here we have the ultimate anti-Hallmark movie. But the problem is… what is the purpose of all of this grittiness? What is it adding to to the story? And what is it taking away in the process?

So how does this movie rank overall?

28/50 = 56%/ D-. No, this movie didn’t work for me at all…

Time to go back to A Muppet Christmas Carol next Christmas. It truly is the perfect adaptation.