The Nutcracker and the Four Realms 2018
This movie got pretty bad reviews when it came out, but I like the music from The Nutcracker Suite and have seen the ballet several times over the years, so I still wanted to see it, taking advantage of Disney Plus so that I could see it in 4k without buying it. I knew this wasn’t the ballet and didn’t have all of the music, but really this is an adventure story with just snippets of the famous music. I was never crazy about the plot of the ballet, so I was open to a new story, but I did not like the direction this movie went. It feels a little like the Alice in Wonderland movies where rival kingdoms war in a fantasy world and a young girl is supposed to somehow fix all of it. Or maybe a Wizard of Oz ripoff. The cast is not very strong despite a few big names in Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren, and Keira Knightley, and the performances are not great either. The story is okay, but largely uninspiring, weighed down with a family grieving over the loss of their mother (Disney!). The movie looks good for the most part, maybe its strongest feature, but the makeup makes some of the characters hard to recognize (Knightley and Richard E. Grant) and seems off on others (the Nutcracker and Flower King). It isn’t terrible and is easy to watch, but is generally disappointing.
Written: 05 Mar 2022