Over the last month, I've spent quite considerable hunks of time puzzling over why The Nutcracker and the Four Realms exists. The reasons are quiet obvious and take little time to figure, of course - Disney intersected with Tchaikovsky's work very briefly when they adapted his Nutcracker Suite for a segment in Fantasia, Disney's been on a streak of remaking various classics of theirs both major and minor alike, and 2018's Star Wars offering targeted the traditional May release window rather than their new Christmas block, so turning out a big-budget Nutcracker film like they've been proprietors and overseers of the beloved property all this time works for a holiday market thing. They don't even have to buy a whole studio to get the rights like they'll have to if they ever want to make coin off The Wizard of Oz, they've just gotta pretend that their all-encompassing dominance over childhood nostalgic properties has a transference effect across anything and everything in the public domain with the tiniest connection to Disney, and voila! It even makes sense why it is the way it is, for Tim Burton's vile take on Alice in Wonderland made over one billion dollars worldwide, Kenneth Branagh's better Cinderella did respectable business for its budget, and overconfidence in the Disney offices keeps bad ideas afloat even after, say, Alice Through the Looking Glass turned out a financial disappointment. You've a license to print money with recognizable properties done up in action-fantasy regalia, so away we go, 130 million dollar budget, gonna be a grand ol' time, woo!
My questions were more philosophical in nature. Why are we here, at this point on the board? Must it continue on like this? Is there any conceivable creative spark behind the greenlighting and production of this film, or is it truly just an idea whose final form doesn't matter so long as someone can check off a little box on a list of Good Ideas What Will Make A Billion Dollars? The answer to all of these questions is yes, without fail, but I wonder all the same. The trailer and related marketing materials, though over-designed to such a degree as to embody a wonkily admirable aesthetic all their own, simply looked so boilerplate and uninspired in what they implied, it seemed the only reason any of the Nutcracker stuff showed its face was for the purpose of having a little more reason to use the Sugar Plum Fairy dance and Waltz of the Flowers on the soundtrack than normal in a Christmas movie. And is that really what anyone wants to make a movie about?
Not asking whether the audience wants to SEE it or not, no, I'm curious about the folks who've gotta write and act in and design and direct this stupid thing. Is this how you wish to spend your twilight years, Morgan Freeman? Is this how you foresaw your first big mainstream exposure coalescing, Jayden Fowora-Knight? How exactly did you get here, Lasse Hallström? Were the ABBA music videos and What's Eating Gilbert Grape and all those dog movies not enough? Must you architect something with no soul?
Whatever the reasons (for I'll never know), The Nutcracker and the Four Realms exists, and it's about exactly what its trailers make it out as. New take on Clara Stahlbaum going through a magical adventure in her Godfather Drosselmeyer's house, except instead of a small skirmish between toys and mice with a semi-sweet kinda romance as the main pull, it's this big to do about a locked mechanical egg without a key gifted by her dead mother and a fantasy kingdom the elder Stahlbaum created from crude inert matter with multiple realms based on a few dances from the Tchaikovsky ballet, and wouldn't you just know it the whole thing's gone to hell in a handbasket with a mysterious arch villainand frightening circus imagery and need for a strong warrior queen to march forth and save us all as prophecy foretold and aaaaaaaaaaagh. Pretty lookin' but vapid to the extreme, and lacking in any real identity of its own - in addition to all the bog-standard "Classic fairytale kingdom from your childhood is a little more Game of Thrones now" trappings, they've pinched bits and bobs from Alice, Oz, Narnia, and Disney's newer animated canon entries with shameless liberty. The whole concept's a glass-molded, sugar-coated diorama piece, endlessly reflective of its counterparts an tasting of nothing in particular, a bad bedrock for any story to rest upon.
Somehow, with such an easy formula as, "Exposit, adventure, twist, conclude" to follow as inherited from all the other fantasy imitators its imitating, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms manages to back itself into a corner with some impressively bad character writing. Clara, as played by Mackenzie Foy (who shall remain largely blameless, for not doing anything with the following is probably nobler than making a futile effort), has an alright if simple set of traits at the movie's start: she's clever and into tinkering with machines, she's upset about her mom's death, doesn't want to socialize in the way expected of her societal station, and clashes with her father over how to deal with the grief, retreating into her mechanics as he does his stuffiness. With the whole thing regarding her mysterious locked egg that no amount of tinkering can open without the key, there's the basis for a bit of self-discovery and growth via the medium of an adventure in bootleg Middle-Earth cum Narnia. Too bad for us, though, soon as she follows a string into the Four Realms, she becomes little more than an audience surrogate. All sense of individual personality gets wiped away so she's free to marvel at the pretty sights and wonder at the new characters and feel sad when we're supposed to feel sad and get invested when we're supposed to get invested. Lacking much identity of her own for a goddamned half-hour effectively distances one from her, and primes you less to fall under this world's magical spell, and more notices how it's so concerned with crunching exposition that it only spares about ten seconds total to show you three of the four realms from the title.
(Seriously, they're probably the best designed locations in the film, and we get a single shot of each. Rest of the movie's in a comparatively empty - and probably easier to render - golden palace and various sparse dead woods.)
So, follow me on this one, please, I'm about to do a Thing. Clara has learnt all about the ins and outs of the Four Realms, the supposed dangers posed by Mother Ginger in the disgraced Fourth Realm, and how her mother used a giant machine called The Engine to bring the whole fantasy kingdom to life, effectively making her heir to God's throne in this land. The three good regents need The Engine to build an army to stand against Mother Ginger or else face extermination, but woe of woes! it's broken! Now Clara, showing signs of life and personality for the first time in ages, perks up and suggests she might be able to tinker with the machine and solve the problem, because she's really good with machines and finally has someplace where her talents will be appreciated! But no, we don't actually need her skills or anything unique about her - we need her mother's key, the same key that opens her mechanical egg. Off a-marching we a-go, having a grand old time running about the Fourth Realm, getting attacked by mice, creeped out by clowns, just sorta doing whatever action-y thing comes to mind to tick off time because this little key hunt is all we have for a second act... long story short, Clara gets the key, opens the egg, and nothing. She's devastated, because her mother left a note saying everything she needed was right inside the egg, and there's nothing, so clearly there's nothing important or special about her.
Gee gosh willikers, wouldn't you know it, we get back to the palace, turn on the Engine, and the Sugar Plum Fairy's really the villain for reasons that don't matter and I don't really care about. Point being, she throws Clara in the tower dungeon and plans to destroy the whole Four Realms or something, and Clara? Clara starts getting ideas in her head. Clara starts thinking she has to reach deep down inside, find an inner strength she never knew she had, trust in her knowledge of the laws of mechanics, use them to escape and figure out a way to save the day. She enacts a great escape with lots of verve and daring-do! She spirits her way back into the throne room, where her mother's Engine is spurting out unstoppable tin soldiers! And in a grand act of self-actualization, she sneaks up to the machine, and... uses her tinkering skills to shut it down and stop the Sugar Plum Fairy. Turns out what she needed to do was exactly what she thought she needed to do at the start of the second act, just with an arbitrary march to kill her self-confidence and a little alone time to figure out something about herself she already knew.
That's not a character arc. That's a character ten-yard penalty. "Achieved self-actualization too soon, ten yards back, first down."
I don't know. What else'd'y'want from me here? The Nutcracker's a complete non-entity with no personality and even less reason for being singled out as important in the movie's shaky lore, the backstory and whole dramatic situation relies on implications from Morgan Freeman and flashbacks to Clara's mother which communicate a wholly different backstory than the one Sugar Plum's heel-turn is predicated on through monologue, and its ten steps backwards ten steps forwards story has nothing to say at the end of the day beyond "Keep visiting your childhood imaginary kingdom, or it'll all burn to ash because you weren't good enough to not grow up!" I liked the Mouse King's reimagining as a mouse golem comprised of thousands of mice, though far more as a concept than for how he looks or anything he does, some portions of the expository ballet are rather pretty in both physical movement and the practical effects around the dancers, and the soulless tin soldiers are fairly, appropriately creepy. I'm rather upset at how they only play a few snatches of the final dance piece on a tinny little music box before swapping over to the more "dramatic" sounding Waltz of the Flowers for the real final dance and - does it matter?
Do my further critiques and weak, minor praises have any purpose? It's not fundamentally broken like the Tom and Jerry outing, and it doesn't fall as far into eye-popping, misguided arrogance as 3D, but unlike those works, I cannot think of how to improve this. If I intuited some better means of handling Clara's arc (read: making it an arc in the first place), devised a better use of our first act time than uselessly oggling empty spectacles whilst hiding away the ACTUAL production design achievements behind weird editing choices, strained and labored and sweated to scrub out the uncomfortable "child God fantasies must last forever!" implications, it wouldn't be for anything. The base idea of "The Nutcracker but we're Lord of the Rings and Narnia now" is bad and nonfunctional of itself, and my absolute best suggestion, being "Use a different concept," requires eradicating the movie entire down to its bones to keep suggesting anything better. Uniquely-shaped failure to write a coherent story for its heroine marks the most remarkable thing about The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, and I'm half-inclined to say we shouldn't imagine a better movie in its place, because a muck-up like this is too rare and special to deny. Why continue spilling digital ink on a work I've declared poorly conceived from start to finish, and cannot accept the obvious answers over the whys of its existence for how much they shake my faith in an inherently good universe?
Movie's bad. Don't go watching it. Check out Nutcracker Fantasy and the 1973 Nutcracker short instead. They're far more charming, creative, better designed, and free on YouTube as of this writing to boot. Hell, watch the Barbie movie, it at least does more with its golem character and out-and-back narrative structure.
2/5
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