Since Charles Dickens penned his fantasy ghost story A Christmas Carol, it has become one of the great classics of the holiday.  Stage and film versions have been common, with some of the memorable versions discussed in our last installment.  Now in 2009 Disney has released a new version directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Jim Carrey and a host of familiar names, most in multiple roles aided by heavy makeup, period costume, and an animation process that takes the live actors and distorts them just enough to make the characters seem at home in the largely animated world.  Although that is the version we will be examing, nearly all others follow the basic story line closely enough that the time travel elements of any one are largely consistent with the others.

The new version comes in standard, 3D, and I-Max.  If you suffer from motion sickness, avoid the 3D version or plan to close your eyes during the numerous high-speed flying and running scenes.  Carrey is surprising in the role, as the entire story is played very close to the book, with no added comedic lines.  It makes excellent use of his ability to do realistic falls and similar physical tricks, but uses these mostly seriously.  Wisely, Dickens' dialogue is largely preserved.  More impressively, the film is frightening at what is likely the level at which the original book might have been to the original audience.  There are only a few places, mostly surrounding Fezziwig's party, where the impossible happens without supernatural intervention, and these are small impossibilities common in cartoons.  This is not another Muppets version, but is presented seriously.  It is overall very well done.

Most readers already know the storyline:  after displaying his miserly character, Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his deceased partner Marley, who warns him that three more ghosts will haunt him with a view to saving him from Marley's fate.  The three spirits then show him views of Christmas past, present, and future, and it is here that the time travel appears.

It is usually time travel to the past which creates problems.  Dickens covers that well, though:  the past is shadows of things that were, unaware of the visiting observers from the future, and thus they change nothing.  It is merely Scrooge's present memory that is altered, the trip to the past serving to recall who he once was and how he changed.

Time travel to the future does not create problems, except as connected to a return trip; that is where the problems arise.  Scrooge is taken to see a Christmas on which he dies, and struck by how little anyone cares.  This view of himself he takes back to the present, and so alters his conduct to escape it, to change the future he has seen based on the information he gained from observing it.  More complicating, he sees the "present" Christmas Day, the day which when he goes to bed had not yet happened and when he arises had still not yet happened, and we are forced to wonder whether the Ghost of Christmas Present carried him to the future and back, or whether he lived through that day, met the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come at the end of the day, and then was sent back to Christmas Eve.  Either way, when he awakens he immediately begins changing the future based on his knowledge from the future:  the Cratchits will eat turkey, not goose, and he interrupts the game of Twenty Questions in which he would be the butt of the joke to join his nephew for dinner.

Logically, if he has changed the future, he has erased the source of his knowledge.  The ghosts now cannot have taken him to see what now will never have happened.  Without that vision, though, he will not change, and thus under replacement theory we have an infinity loop.  We fare slightly better under parallel and divergent dimension theories, as we can assume that Scrooge saw the future of one universe but lived that of another.  That, though, leaves a universe in which Scrooge never changes, which seriously undermines the point of the story, that it is never too late to repent.

The solution lies in Scrooge's question:  is this what will be, or what may be?  He is not seeing the future; like in Minority Report he is seeing the most probable future based on the present at the moment he leaves it.  The information he receives alters the probabilities after that moment, and so the future is altered without changing the fact that at that moment in the past a different future was predicted.  Scrooge is saved, as is the story.