Clara, fans deserve better
“The Nutcracker and the Four Realms”? What in the cuckoo Christmas blasphemy is this? Disney, continuing on its inexorable death march to add more war to soft and beautiful classic childhood stories, has plucked all the feathers from Tchaikovsky and Petipa’s holiday ballet and tossed a bunch of glitter and circus clowns at its quivering carcass. This is your warning that if you have any affinity for the ballet, avoid this at all costs.
This take on “The Nutcracker,” written by Ashleigh Powell in her screenwriting debut, somehow directed by both Lasse Hallstrom and Joe Johnston, takes merely a few key elements of the ballet and then tosses them into a blender, along with “Alice and Wonderland,” “The Greatest Showman” and Stanley Tucci in “The Hunger Games,” to create something wildly kooky and more violent. And yet it’s got incredibly low stakes, and it’s a mere shadow of what “The Nutcracker” actually is.
Sure, “girl falls asleep on Christmas Eve and dreams an awesome dance show” isn’t a whole lot of plot. But the story this team has come up with is rife with insidious Disney story fetishes, including the addition of the requisite dead mother to offer pathos and motivation for our heroine. Clara (Mackenzie Foy) is obsessed with science and an engineering genius, which will come in handy later when facing the other Disney obsession of late (giant clock gears).
A film adaptation of “The Nutcracker” doesn’t have to be faithful, but the story they have concocted is so lazily tossed off, the style so derivative and the lessons so mundane they would have been better off sticking to the original story by E.T.A. Hoffmann and throwing a razzledazzle production budget at the choreography, as the best part of “Nutcracker and the Four Realms” is the oh-so-short sequence where ballerina Misty Copeland dances through an abridged version of the ballet. To salt the wound, they use only a few excerpts of Tchaikovsky’s music. Turns out the excess of realms (and cooks in the kitchen) results in hardly any holiday magic at all.