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Each Christmas season, people everywhere get dressed up in their holiday finest to enjoy a local production of Tchaikovsky’s classic holiday ballet, The Nutcracker. And now Disney takes the beloved ballet and turns it into a big-screen fantasy in The Nutcracker and the Four Realms.
The Nutcracker and the Four Realms tells the story of Clara (Mackenzie Foy), an inventive young girl who isn’t interested in celebrating Christmas without her beloved mother. When she receives a beautiful egg-shaped box on Christmas Eve, she goes in search of the missing key—and the search takes her to a magical land that her mother once ruled as queen. There, she finds that the kingdom’s four realms are deep in conflict, so Clara joins the army to march into the Fourth Realm, led by Mother Ginger (Helen Mirren), to retrieve her key and restore peace in this magical place.
This big-screen adaptation of the classic ballet is certainly a sight to behold: a grand musical fantasy with a cool (and sometimes creepy) steampunk touch, and a little bit of dance thrown in for good measure. The set design is stunning, traveling from workshops to wonderlands, through kingdoms of snow and flowers and candy. And the costume design is remarkable, too. In fact, everything about this film is whimsical and imaginative and visually striking, working together with the classical numbers and James Newton Howard’s perfectly-adapted score to make for a magical, dreamlike experience.
The film’s problem, however, is that the story isn’t nearly as remarkable as the design. The muddled plot is generally difficult to follow, shifting from scenes of exposition to scenes of meaningless fluff—and it’s even harder to explain. The focus constantly shifts from one adventure to another, and none of it makes a whole lot of sense. And while this magical world is certainly beautiful, there’s really no explanation of what it is or how Clara’s mother just happened to become its queen.
Fortunately, it’s easy to get caught up in the beauty of it all. This is certainly a stunning film. But while the young princess of this world spends the film searching for answers, viewers will be doing the same.
If you’re just looking for a pretty holiday film, then, you’ll be able to enjoy the music and costumes and magical lands of The Nutcracker and the Four Realms. But, beneath its dazzling surface, there’s just not much there.
Listen to the review on Reel Discovery:
