So I finally got around to watching that Disney Nutcracker movie... like.
(warning for Spoilers for Nutcracker and the Four Realms if you haven't seen it and still care)
(TL;DR - I didn't exactly care about this movie, here's why)
okay, thats not quite true, I mean, don't get me wrong, theres not much I loved about it, but its mostly harmless in terms of Disney's live-action roster of films.
I enjoyed the design of the castle, and I appreciated the step away from the source material, like at least its something different. That being said, I felt throughout the entire run time that it was trying too hard to be something else. I felt like I'd seen all this before, and then I put it together.
Nutcracker and the Four Realms feels too much like it's trying to be Narnia (2005), Alice in Wonderland (2010), and it just rubs me the same way Beauty and the Beast (2017) did, which is to say, the wrong way. And its not even ripping the good parts of the films it's trying to be (excluding BatB, there's nothing redeeming about that film and no one can tell me otherwise, this is the hill I will die on), the main, while leagues better than Mia Wasikowska and Emma Watson, still manages to fall into the realm of "I just experienced magic for the first time and my only reaction is a disinterested sort-of-open mouth". Seriously, she enters the magical world through her godfathers house while looking for her Christmas present, and she makes it a long way - like a good 15 minutes into the adventure - before she even expresses ANY sort of emotion about it, like, girl you just walked into the set of Narnia - you think I'm joking, don't you - and you don't even comment on it???? I remember watching the commentary for the Narnia film, and Georgie Henley saying that they'd blindfolded her and led her to the lamppost set so they could film her genuine first reaction, and you can feel it in that performance, her starry-eyed wonder feels real. Its a similar situation here, but again, Clara doesn't have any reaction to suddenly stepping out of a tree trunk and being in a winter wonderland. It kinda bugged me.
Then we find out that her mother is the queen of the magical world, and she's a princess. Cool, right? No reaction, nothing, no thought as to how odd it is that her mother is queen at all, its just brushed over. Okay, we won't talk about that either, look at the pretty scenery... except the very next scenes are in a dark forest that isn't very interesting, so now I'm just thinking how weird it is that she's just going with it and not asking any questions whatsoever, or being awestruck by anything. Its like how Alice in the Burton films through over half of that movie is all "this is a dream so it doesn't matter", Clara's whole thing is "well I need to find the key to this present my mother gave me, so none of this other stuff is important". Hello child, what do you even mean, all of this is important, and I'd like to know more about it, but no we aren't gonna learn anything about anyone in this film are we? Certainly not the nutcracker soldier, Phillip, ya know, the namesake of the story?
I'm gonna go off on a tangent for a sec, bare with me. So in the story of the Nutcracker (like, the ballet and the various other variations of the story), at least, any version I've seen, the Nutcracker has always been a prince and its always been Main Girl (there's a few different name variations depending on the story) that breaks a curse or spell or choose-your-reasoning over the nutcracker that made him... well, a nutcracker. Different things happen throughout the story depending on the version, but the nutcracker is always a nutcracker. This film follows a different beat, obviously, but here's just sort of a guy. We don't learn anything about him, he's not a nutcracker we have to break the spell over - they keep calling him a nutcracker, and I guess we see him in a flashback where he's a nutcracker ornament and not, you know, the actual nutcracker we see her little brother Fritz playing with earlier in the movie - he's not very interesting, but by the end of the movie it acts like we and the main character are supposed to care about him. And maybe I missed something, but I just didn't. Like congrats on being promoted to head guard or whatever, but I'm ready to move on.
Speaking of the movie treating itself as if important things happened, I don't know where I zoned out - I didn't - but somewhere at the hour mark everybody is talking as if important life-changing things have been happening the entire movie. And I'm sitting here thinking 'what are you talking about, nothing has happened'. We met three other characters who we will proceed to learn nothing about (and also my two favorite characters in the entire film who didn't get nearly enough screen time, hats off to the two guards), and therefore not care about when things get bad, and then we had a minor scuffle with the 'bad guy' (the one thing I can say is that I understand why people have a fear of clowns now). Everyone is acting like we're at the precipice right before the final battle, and Clara's all "i thought I'd find the answers, but I'm just as lost as I was when I got here" as if anyone over the age of 8 hadn't already figured out the 'everything you need is inside' is the most obvious metaphor you could put in a movie why did you have to make it so blatant if you were gonna do it anyway???
And THEN, we finally get to the biggest trope of them all, boy am I sick of this ESPECIALLY in Disney movies. They go and pull a 'the person you thought was bad is good, and the person you thought was good is bad' with the Sugarplum fairy of all people. This is the same thing that happened with Frozen and Zootopia, where it almost basically came out of nowhere (I'd watch it again to see if I missed anything, but honestly I don't think I did, I didn't see any hints), and there's barely any rhyme or reason to it. Like they give a reason. She's sad that Clara's mom left them and she has some kind of abandonment issues that I would've LOVED to see given just a bit more screen time but NOOOOOO here's another thing we won't talk about in any kind of meaningful detail. We don't really know why she turned against Mother Ginger (the original 'bad guy') specifically, and then the movie basically kills her, like, I don't agree with what you did, but dang.
The battle at the end, which I remember being a big part of the trailers that I'd seen, but don't quote me on that, was so very underwhelming. You had an army of tin soldiers come to life and set to go attack Mother Ginger, and you had not only the real army all locked up together that you could've released, but you had the "mouse King", the nutcracker and Mousrinks, Mother ginger, and Clara and her inventor schtick basically alone with the machine that brings toys to actual life, and we get shown her holding a box full of mechanical wind-up mice, so I'm thinking I know where this is going, she's gonna distract the tin soldiers, and bring the wind-ups to life to fight against the soldiers, its gonna be a big fight before the climax. But no, we get those weird roley-poley clown matryoshka things knocking a few of them over and then Ginger with a whip attacking the soldiers while Clara tries to turn off the machine (which I'm still not entirely sure if she did).
Cue one of the "she didn't leave me alone, she didn't leave you alone" speeches where the main tries to appeal to the villains better nature. Cue probably murder, I'm not actually sure since all the residents of the realms apparently started out as toys anyway. Cue the supposed heartfelt goodbye between the nutcracker and Clara. Cue Clara going back to the party and acting like nothing happened in what looks like its supposed to be a tongue-and-cheek way with her godfather who OBVIOUSLY knows that that magic world is a thing, but doesn't mention it. Cue an apology to the father and admitting that they both miss the dead mother, because of course there's a dead mother, it's a Disney film. Cue owl we don't know anything about flying away ala Labyrinth ending. The end.
It was all very... underwhelming. Like, I appreciated what it was attempting to be, and I really appreciated the CGI more that I have in any of their other recent live action anythings, but it just didn't work for me. Like I said, it felt like it was trying to hard to be something else, to the point in which it doesn't feel like it even has an identity as Disney's Nutcracker. That coulee been something, "Disney's the Nutcracker", but honestly it's so not its own thing that I forgot it was even a thing for a whole year, it didn't have anything that drew me in, it didn't have anything that originally made me even want to see it (I remember seeing the trailers while I was still recovering from BatB and even then I could tell because it marketed itself as "from the makers of Beauty and the Beast"), the only reason I even put it on was because I'm working on another project and I was curious about different adaptations of the story. Its not the worst offender Disney's put on their team, not by a long long shot, and it is mostly harmless - to the point of boredom - but I don't know if I'll ever go back it.
