The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018)

The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018)

3/10

Starring

Keira Knightley

Mackenzie Foy

Eugenio Derbez

Matthew Macfadyen

Directed by Lasse Hallström and Joe Johnston

This is not the best of productions, Disney I feel failed to get the best writers and people to make this movie the beautiful gift it is supposed to be.

The pace of the movie is slow and drags sometimes with empty composure. Incoherent at times and the acting needed more passion. This lack of passion in this production can be felt, as the movie drags with sorrowful intent, that makes you wonder, what the aim was. This is supposed to be fantasy adventure for children not tragedy meets hopelessness for the depressed.

The movie is based on both E. T. A. Hoffmann's short story "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" and Marius Petipa's and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker.

The movie starts with the introduction of Clara Stahlbaum (Mackenzie Foy) who had lost her mother, Marie. Clara, her sister and brother with their father are finding it hard to move on. Her father is wanting to make everything seem okay and focuses on appearances to hide his grief. Clara instead wants to grief and stay away from appearances.

On Christmas eve, the family go to a party hosted by Drosselmeyer (Morgan Freeman). He raised Marie when she was younger and he loves to make toys with gears. This was also something Marie was good at and Clara inherited it from her mother. Marie left behind gifts for her children when she died, and Clara's was a metallic egg with a missing key.

During the party the key to the egg was the gift Drosselmeyer gave her, but she had to go on a little search to find it. That search led her out of her world to the magical world of the four realms. It was there that a mouse stole the key and while Clara chases she encounters a nutcracker. It was he who made her know she was a Princess in the world she is in. She later had an adventure with him and is told to stay away from the forth realm.

He led her to meet the rulers of the other three realms and she was told the story of how the realms came to be and why the forth realm is seen as evil.

We also learn that Marie created the world as a young girl by animating everyone in it with a machine that turn toys into real people.

Now the other three realms also need the key Clara is searching for so they can defeat Mother Ginger, the leader of the fourth realm.

The movie takes twenty minutes to introduce everyone we are supposed to meet, but the plot just never develops. The why, the how and what the hell is this movie about does not seem to be the concern of the writers, in the beginning of the movie. It also seem like the writers could careless if we understood why we are here or not and made us wait forty minutes before we can grasp the whole picture, before they inserted their plot twist and what not.

What the movie has that is amazing is the beautiful ballet used to tell a story of the realms and the visual effects, set design and costumes are magnificent.

Here is a movie worth avoiding.