When the Glade candle commercial promoting The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018) plays in front of said movie and is more magical than the actual film, that is a major red flag. I never thought I would say this, but this is 2018's A Wrinkle in Time 2.0, with the younger actors being the standouts (especially Mackenzie Foy) this time around and the adults (including the likes of Keira Knightley, Helen Mirren, and Morgan Freeman) delivering a mixed bag of performances. While there are genuine moments of childlike wonder in this movie, they are few and far between and overshadowed by familiar fantasy film tropes done a hundred times better in the past. I can only imagine this movie's pre-production stage being the Disney executives scrambling to find a public domain intellectual property to adapt to the big screen for a quick billion dollars and film franchise.
The movie begins in Victorian London with Clara (Foy), a young girl grieving her mother's loss, and her being invited to her Godfather (played by Morgan Freeman)'s Christmas Eve ball. From there, she finds herself in a magical land with eccentric characters and discovering a darker side to the legendary fairy tale. Before I delve into spoiler territory, the first act does a pretty good job of displaying Clara's intelligence, charm, and emotional state with her family. It shows the first and only inklings of pure wonder as she finds her way into the Four Realms.
The film's overall visual aesthetic (sets, costumes, makeup, art direction, etc.) is Oscar-worthy. However, like A Wrinkle in Time, some of the film's computer-generated imagery (especially during the Fourth Realm scenes) is hit-and-miss. James Newton Howard's score featuring excerpts from The Nutcracker Ballet gives this movie a much-needed emotional core and sense of whimsical flair and is one of the film's few bright spots. Foy is charming as Clara and has a bright future ahead of her as an actress. I genuinely cannot wait to see what she will accomplish later on, but sadly, the rest of this movie was not up to her potential. Misty Copeland is well-cast as the Ballerina, and her scenes are great, but said scenes simultaneously frustrated me because every time I became invested in Copeland telling the story of the Four Realms through her dancing, the movie would cut away from her to the main characters who would audibly explain to the audience in real-time. This scene brings me to the movie's not-so-positive aspects.
As soon as Clara enters the Four Realms and meets Philip the Nutcracker (played by Jayden Fowora-Knight), the emotional investment that I had in Clara and her journey largely evaporated, as she began to act like a cartoon version of herself. Only through flashbacks to Clara's past seen later on, did my emotional attachment to her return. Also, this film feels like multiple fantasy movies cobbled together, namely Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010), The Wizard of Oz (1939), and the aforementioned A Wrinkle in Time, which only adds to my stance that this movie was made solely for a quick and easy cash-grab. This movie's side characters from the Four Realms are either so obnoxiously unfunny or horrendously goofy that as I watched this film in the theater, I repeatedly found myself questioning whether I was watching a live-action Disney film or an incredibly cheesy live-action cartoon featuring characters from The Nutcracker. Speaking of cartoon characters, Knightley's performance as the Sugar Plum Fairy is so overly sweet and sugary that it makes Uma Thurman's performance as Poison Ivy from Batman and Robin (1997) look Oscar-worthy. Also, Mirren and Freeman waste their immense talents as they are relegated to placeholder characters for Clara to interact with and drive the story forward.
In conclusion, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms' visual splendor and rare glimmers of heart and holiday spirit cannot save itself from its severe case of Disneyfication, predictable twists and turns, and a significant lack of identity. It was such a disappointment that I could not wait for Bumblebee (2018)'s early screening that was coming in a few weeks.
Final Score: 3 out of 10
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