Keira Knightley's Sugar Plum Fairy from "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms"... I loved everything about this movie so much and she STOLE my HEART💖💗💖🍬🍥
I was so pleased when I heard there was going to be a movie about a fantastical adventure featuring a preteen girl traveling to a magical land of enchantment and single-handedly saving the day! It seems like just yesterday I was reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonde--oh, erm. Sorry. Wrong fantastical adventure. Of course, this story is about an unknowing princess, who rules over a magical land divided into realms that is going to succumb to a terrible egotistical woman’s wrath if the princess doesn’t do something. I remember the first time I journeyed into Narn--oh. Not that one either, eh?
Sort of seems like we’re in well-worn territory here, doesn’t it? In making a full-length feature loosely based on a Russian ballet, loosely based on a French short story, loosely based on a German fairy tale, is Disney just trying to wring every penny it can from a well-worn fantasy formula all wrapped up in a shiny Christmas bow? Well...
Uh, yeah. It is. I can’t think of anything new, daring, or groundbreaking about this Christmas story. It’s perfectly adequate, empty sweetness, with a tiny bit of nightmare fuel mixed in. Sort of like the generic chocolate you get for every holiday from the dollar store? Like...it’s fine. But when you’re staring into the soulless eyes of this Santa made from a substance that’s not even legally allowed to call itself chocolate, you know that you’re not getting the best the world has to offer.
So, this movie. Clara (Mackenzie Foy) is searching for a key to open a locked egg given to her as a posthumous Christmas present from her mother. At Drosselmeyer’s (Morgan Freeman) Christmas party, she is led via golden thread to a doorway leading to a fantastical kingdom known as the Four Realms, and her key! But the key gets lost, and with the help of a nutcracker soldier named Phillip (Jayden Fowora-Knight), Clara travels through all four realms to find it. Along the way she discovers her mother built this whole land, she is the heir apparent princess, and three of the realms, led by Sugar Plum, Shiver, and Hawthorne (Keira Knightley, Richard E Grant, and Eugenio Derbez), are at war with the fourth, led by the dastardly Mother Ginger (Helen Mirren). Only Clara is clever enough to find the key and use it to defeat the villainous schemes that are threatening to tear all the realms apart.
OR: Girl walks through a tree to a magical land where she’s a princess, meets a colorful cast of characters, learns valuable lessons about the power of friendship and self-worth, and makes it home in time for supper.
Some thoughts:
My favorite thing is that all of Clara’s dresses have pockets. Well done, costume department!
The clowns that jump out of Mother Ginger’s skirts are incredibly disturbing and give me serious Return to Oz vibes, and I am NOT FEELING IT.
Jack Whitehall plays a bumbling sort of courtier guard guy and is honestly one of the brightest spots of the movie because he looks like he’s having a ton of fun. It’s like the one uncontrollable flare of emotion in a sea of homogeny.
Don’t get me wrong, the movie is beautiful. It’s very purposefully cultivated shine and sparkle - every realm is awash in just-so CGI detail, and the aesthetic of each is unique and hyperrealistic. It all just feels so safe. So...DISNEYFIED. And by that I mean the bad parts of Disney magic. It’s fantastical, but manufactured. It’s beautiful, but empty. It’s all cotton candy, no vegetables.
Captain Phillip Nutcracker is so cute, and it feels weird shipping two children, but he and Clara have maaaaaad chemistry. I legit thought they were going to kiss when she went back to her home, which is a weird way to feel in a kids’ movie. Like, you know I am not one for forced heteronormativity AT ALL. But if there wasn’t at least some good-natured flirting between these two on set, I would be shocked.
Every mini episodic adventure feels almost like a video game level. There’s no real threat or danger. Like, Clara leads an expedition of soldiers into the fourth realm to confront Mother Ginger and once she has her little showdown she peaces out. Ok, but what about all those soldiers you left in the fourth realm - fuck those guys, I guess.
At least in Disney’s move to showcase #diversity, they’re really swinging for the fences. A Russian ballet set in London with a villain who speaks French? We really are the great American melting pot.
Helen Mirren is a gift and she is wasted here. Disney, you have a queen on your hands, and you give her this? This paltry 6 minutes of screen time while Keira Knightley is shrieking in French? Appalling.
Obviously Morgan Freeman is perfection, but I had to laugh at his line about Clara’s mother, Marie. “Her greatest creation was you” DUDE SHE HAD OTHER KIDS. THEY CAN HEAR YOU.
The best part was seeing Misty Copeland, the first African-American principal dancer in American Ballet Theater history, performing excerpts from the ballet during the closing credits. As much as this movie feels like empty calories, there is something soul-stirring about seeing performers of color in primary roles and as prima ballerinas for the first time in a giant, grand Disney fantasy.
You’re better off listening to the Boston Symphony Orchestra play Tchaikovsky’s version of The Nutcracker ballet, or just buying a $5 bag of walnuts and going to town on those bad boys with your own nutcracker. This movie is as inoffensive as cotton candy, and will melt away just as quickly if you try to grab ahold of anything about it.
