This isn’t the
best of productions. I feel like Disney failed to get the best writers and team
to make this movie the beautiful gift it was supposed to be. The pace is slow
and drags at times, feeling empty and incoherent. The acting lacks passion, and
that lack of energy is felt throughout the production. The movie plods along
with a sorrowful tone that makes you wonder what the aim was. This is supposed
to be a fantasy adventure for children, not a tragedy filled with hopelessness
for the depressed.
The movie is
based on 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 story begins
with Clara Stahlbaum (Mackenzie Foy), who has lost her mother, Marie. Clara,
her sister, brother, and father are struggling to move on. Her father tries to
make everything seem okay by focusing on appearances to hide his grief, while
Clara wants to grieve openly and avoid pretending.
On Christmas
Eve, the family attends a party hosted by Drosselmeyer (Morgan Freeman), who
raised Marie when she was young. Drosselmeyer loves making toys with gears, a
skill Marie shared and passed down to Clara. Before her death, Marie left gifts
for her children, and Clara’s was a metallic egg with a missing key. During the
party, Drosselmeyer gives Clara the key, but she has to go on a little search
to find it. This search leads her out of her world and into the magical world
of the Four Realms. There, a mouse steals the key, and while chasing it, Clara
encounters a nutcracker. He reveals that she is a princess in this world. She
embarks on an adventure with him and is warned to stay away from the Fourth
Realm.
The three realms
need the key Clara is searching for to defeat Mother Ginger, the leader of the
Fourth Realm.
The movie takes
twenty minutes to introduce all the characters, but the plot never really
develops. The why, how, and what the hell is this movie about don’t
seem to concern the writers early on. It feels like they couldn’t care less if
we understood what was happening, making us wait forty minutes before we can
grasp the whole picture. Only then do they throw in a plot twist.
What the movie
does have going for it are the beautiful ballet sequences used to tell the
story of the realms, as well as stunning visual effects, set designs, and
costumes.
Overall, this is
a movie worth avoiding.
0 comments:
Post a Comment