Goodness, but ambition sure can go wrong, can't it? Andrei Konchalovsky reportedly sat on and tinkered with the idea for what ultimately became The Nutcracker in 3D (alternately The Nutcracker: The Untold Story) for a solid twenty years, long after he became a frequent film fest circuit contender, and in which time he continued to direct, write, and produce a wide variety of films across multiple genres. This here was his passion project, a grand fantasy epic built upon little by little whenever he had time, finally realized after two decades' gestation with a budget of $90 million, well in excess of anything he'd directed since Tango and Cash. Grand ideas given grand stage and a (relatively) lavish pocketbook, enough to justify playing with musical elements, massive soundstages, scores of extras, a wholly CG character or two, and the best 3D effects money could buy. One might, perhaps, observe how "the best 3D effects money could buy" in the year prior to its ultimate 2010 release came from a film costing this project's budget three times over, and that the base material was shelved since 2007, and start to understand what went wrong.
Hubris is our watchword for today. Hubris in thinking a production so plainly bloated by B-name theater actors' salaries and enormous soundstages could afford a little skimpiness on the effects budget, and so crafting a final product where flying effects and CG characters render as vaguely floating a few feet above the film rather than anywhere inside it. Hubris in Tim Rice deciding his lyrical compositions for the musical numbers would not use Tchaikovsky's ballet pieces as a base and follow their lead with a complimentary rhythm, but rather be designed for singing along to every not, regardless of whether or not the resultant cadence sounds anywhere close to a natural register. Hubris in believing many side characters so plainly charming on the face of it that we needn't see them between their too-brief introduction and an end-of-second-act crisis wherein they display none of their personality quirks again in favor of generic fantasy action platitudes. Hubris in thinking spending the entire second act wholly detatched from the fantasy world and spinning our wheels on some domestic drama the film clearly doesn't care for is at all an acceptable way to stay within our budget when it really kills the pacing dead and causes many following beats to feel redundant.
Hubris with regards to the rats, oh my GOD, the rats. I can only assume Konchalovsky and his contributors thought as far as, "Well other films use a little Third Reich imagery as shorthand for the bad guys, we can as well," and then trotted out said justification every time they wanted to add a little more. The rats march around in full-blown SS uniforms, round up innocent people from the street, throw them into concentration camps, operate massive ovens designed to burn those they scapegoat as ruining the world, and talk up the eventual birth of a glorious rat masterrace and a Rat Empire which will last for one thousand years. All right there, on the surface, no necessary distancing whatsoever, plain and simple Nazi stuff. Let's not also forget, they still have rodent faces, rodent faces which look very much like Nazi propaganda caricatures of Jewish people besides, and most talk with heavy Italian/Brooklyn accents. And listen, listen - while I am the world's foremost advocate for scaring kids through children's movies, the effects on John Turturro's face when his Rat King gets upset and he morph-roars into a monstrous rat face are all too much, all too distressing, and deployed all too frequently for how much I don't like looking at it. Also, their arrival into the movie evokes 9/11 imagery, and Turturro electrocutes a pet shark at one point, for no reason other than making this whole thing more off-kilter and distressing.
Looking at The Nutcracker in 3D with a proper critical eye, though, trying to see beyond all the odd, excessive, easily-identifiable bad creative decisions, and figure out what really went wrong, I think the briefly mentioned structural problems drag the movie more than any of the Nazi rat stuff. Don't get me wrong, unless we perform corrective surgery on the film, wholly remove all the Nazi motifs, and find literally any other thematic costuming as a replacement, it will always have that millstone round its neck, but figuring out the structural problems could help a lot. You can get away with quite a bit if a story plays as familiar or resonant in the broad strokes, making your idiosyncrasies read as "Alright, go off but I'm with you" instead of "What in God's good name are you DOING?" Bad as the Nazi rats, the child acting, and the effects compositing are, The Nutcracker in 3D's greatest weakness lies in how it flaunts conventional story structure in favor of a protracted second act in the real world, with all hints of the fantastical banished to the margins. To illustrate my point, allow me to propose as potential alternative layout for the film, in which we only change the order and focus of events with minor eliminations to improve flow.
The first act, with Mary meeting the Nutcracker, exploring the expanded living room, and learning about the curse the Rat Queen placed upon him can play exactly as they do in the movie, except we move the introduction of the Nutcracker's three living doll friends over to the start of act 2, and place more focus on the developing relationship between the two. Rather than spending the second act in the real world, Mary, the cured real boy Nutcracker Prince, and the doll companions spend their time trying to infiltrate the Rat Kingdom and overthrow the Rat King for good, only for the Rat King to discover them, kidnap the retransformed Nutcracker, and banish Mary and the dolls back to the real world. THEN we can play out a shorter, tighter focused version of act 2's runaround as a start-of-act-3 crisis,and proceed with the movie's third act as is, only with better defined supporting characters and a stronger relationship between Mary and the Nutcracker. Compare this to how little screentime the two share in the film as-is, and how much of the back half of the second act is dedicated to rerunning the first act's set-up with new stakes while assuming we've any reason to invest, and the problem should be plain. Spending so much time insisting Mary stay separated from the Nutcracker and the Rat Kingdom only serves to kill the film's capacity to engage an audience; a structure more in-line with traditional children's fantasy epics would help the piece flow, get us deeper into the weirder elements, and at least acclimatize us to the stranger elements in addition to strengthening the character work.
Or, as an alternate proposal, how about we keep the film's structure as is, weirdly lengthy return to reality and all, except we shift around our thematic focus instead? Exact same movie up to the thirty-minute mark, except Mary's attempt to lift the Rat Queen's curse doesn't work, because for all the enchanting, fantastical sights around her, she doesn't really believe in what she's seeing just yet. The sudden return to mundane reality thusly hits her harder, and her father's attempts to shake those silly dreams for her head has a tangible impact on her. That whole meandering musical number where Uncle Albert sings about a magic pebble her father had as a boy connects more directly to Mary's story, and when the Nutcracker returns to bring Mary and her brother Max back for another try at liberation, she only goes reluctantly, and only invests fully for the third act because the Rat King kidnaps Max. You can then run the third act as a simultaneous "Rescue my brother" narrative and a "I have to actually care and believe in all those childlike things like imagination and dreams" story, to boost up the effect when Mary finally lifts the curse and claims she never wants to leave this new home. Just one change to one plot point and a shift in the main character's attitude, and you can make this odd structure work a little better.
I'm personally more into the first proposal than the second, for the first allows the film to indulge in its weird attempts at spectacle more openly than the second, which probably requires turning down the bombast to sell the audience on Mary's refusal to truly believe until the climax. Either way, they both show how The Nutcracker in 3D didn't necessarily have to break so badly as it does. There's so much "This is MY passion project, and we're doing it the way I like!" running through every aspect of the production, I've a hard time believing you could wrangle a wholly good or appealing story from the wreck, especially if we're really honestly truly married to doing Rat Nazis and not spending a proportionate amount of money on our effects. With a different structure though, regardless of if it's more traditional or more suited to supporting a thematic idea, we might've seen a respectable if heavily flawed, too indulgent work that communicates something and delivers a mildly enjoyable experience. It is broken and misconceived, but the foundations could've supported SOMETHING, rather than the haphazard mess we got. Which, all told, is better than the total, doomed-from-the-start failure of the Tom and Jerry Nutcracker film.
(Let me tell you, it was REALLY distracting hearing Moaning Myrtle's voice coming from the Nutcracker's mouth the entire film.)
2/5
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