User reviews

There must been a lot of group think around this movie. Or, Disney has taken on more projects than they can handle. I have genuinely enjoyed the disney movies I have taken my children to in the past few years. This one... did not reach mediocre status. It had potential, and was beautiful. But the story was just not there, the characters were one-dimensional, and several moments were deeply uncomfortable. There were moments between the father and Clara that felt awkward at best, and a little insidious at worst. It is just a really disappointing end product, and I hope that they have done better with their other movies that are set to come out soon.

With each holiday season, we're reminded of stories like A Christmas Carol, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and even A Visit from St. Nicholas. The story of the Nutcracker is another one often seen. Though originally starting as a novel titled "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King", most people remember it as a ballet that was composed by Tchaikovsky. A lot remember either performing in it or having a six year old that performed in it. It has little nostalgia value to me, but I can't deny that the image of the Nutcracker has become synonymous with Christmas. So why haven't there been more adaptations?

"The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" suffers similar problems of other fairy tales in which it contains elements that wouldn't adapt well in a visual format. Much of the ballet, if you were to chose that story, focuses on the dancing, with the plot really taking no more then about fifteen minutes. It's possible that the storytellers at Disney could take the tale and make it something better. The story of "The Snow Queen" took several tries before it was made into Frozen. Let's see if Disney can find the magic to make The Nutcracker and the Four Realms a strong toy.

During the Victorian era in London, young Clara (played by Mackenzie Foy) is a very smart, clever girl who would rather read and study science then go to parties. Her father insists that she, and her siblings, go to her godfathers Christmas Eve party. Before they go, they all receive late Christmas presents from their late mother Marie. At the party, Clara goes to her godfather Drosselmeyer (played by Morgan Freeman) to open her present, a metal egg with an inscribing "Everything you need is inside", but tells her it's a part of her mothers wishes.

While searching for her present, she is lead into a mysterious forest where she encounters a nutcracker, Captain Phillip (played by Jayden Fowora-Knight). Upon hearing that she's the daughter of Marie, he takes her to a palace where she discovers is the center of an enchanted kingdom covering four realms. The Sugar Plum Fairy (played by Kira Knightly) thinks that the key to opening Clara's gift is within the grasp of Mother Ginger (played by Helen Mirren). Clara comes to discover that not all is as appears and that she needs to take her mothers place as queen to save everything.

The idea of taking The Nutcracker and the Four Realms and turning it into an Alice in Wonderland/Narnia story is not a bad idea. But despite good intentions to modernize it, it falls on it's feet. This is a film equivalent of a gingerbread house; nice to look at, but completely hollow on the inside. To start with, the movie is very pretty to look at (even if it goes overboard with the CGI imagery). When it needs to look magical, it's magical. When it needs to be scary, it can be nightmare inducing. When it needs to look like Christmas, I want to go there.

But that's where the film stops for me. My main problem is the story itself, which is not only a copy of the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland, but offers no morals except to "BELIEVE IN YOURSELF". Not only is it incredibly lazy, but in the case of the main character, did she really need that? The opening shows Clara happily operating an invention of her own, but mentions she's too sad for Christmas. Huh...what? The other characters like Mother Ginger, Sugar Plum Fairy, and the Nutcracker simply say the same lesson over.

Im sure a lot of parents will still want to take their kids because it's still a good lesson. Let me just say that when I went to the theater, the family filled autitorum contained more silence and people fussing in their seats. I too was fussy as despite being only an hour and a half, it feels too long and drawn out. Pacing is another problem as a lot of it seems more focused on world building then establishing character. Even that fails because it looks so theatrical and plastic, that I can't imagine anything living in this place. You know your Nutcracker is in trouble with when a ballet dance happens, the Sugar Plum Fairy explains the story within the dance rather then letting the intelligence of the audience figure it out.

I'll give this three broken nutcrackers out of ten. While it may not be the worst, it's certainly one of the more "sloppily put together" movies Disney has put out. I love the Christmas season and hate to see a holiday film wasted on something that's not invested in itself. At this point, your six year olds Nutcracker ballet will be more entertaining then this mess. This sugary mess is a definite skip.

I think is a ball breaker more than a nutcracker......

The character of the sugar plum needed to be axed as it was played by the awfully annoying knightley. Her fake voice makes you want to leave the cinema. The other characters were great but others needed bigger rolls.

I had high expectations for this holiday Disney movie. Oh boy, was I disappointed.

What a bloated, tangled, boring mess. The writer and director must have been asleep and didn't care as this was awful. Disney, how could you have released this?

Oh, good lord it's horrible. I try to see the best in most film and TV I see, I really do - but this one is a challenge to find anything.

So, in classic Disney fashion, a (wealthy) Victorian family in London are about to celebrate their first Christmas since the matriarch of the family has passed away. The father of the family, played by Matthew MacFadyen, insists that his three children attend their Godfathers annual Christmas party, at which his middle daughter Clara (Mackenzie Foy) discovers an access portal to the four secret realms, where her mother acted as queen.

From there, the film is very much a cannibalisation of other Disney films, thrown together in a desperate attempt to lengthen the plot to feature length. Principle target is the Tim Burton "Alice In Wonderland" films, though there's bits of "Mary Poppins" and a healthy dose of a live action "Fantasia". The trouble is, it's boring. Irredeemably boring. It generally looks quite nice but I couldn't make myself care about any of it. Its plot twist is obvious, its characters are annoying, its hilariously cruel in its dismissal of the value of the other two children and it's comic relief are never either (Poor Jack Whitehall's Disney career gets off to a bad start). Even if you like Ballet, it only really features in a couple of scenes.

In terms of things I liked, I'll not criticise Mackenzie Foy - she does a reasonable job with what she has to work with. Keira Knightly in the second half of the film looks like she's having fun, even if the audience isn't.

It tells you everything that Disney pushed "Solo's" release forward by six months, to make sure that it stayed away from their impending "Mary Poppins" juggernaut, but were happy to release this, which, on the surface, is a much more comparable film. If they had no faith in the end product, why should you.

Total pants, what were the cast doing in this thing? In fact what were the writers doing? I honestly thought this was a parody film at times, it's that bad. This film is so over produced, with wall to wall action and music and there's such an overload of CGI, even simple scenes of what should have been a simple set appear to all be greenscreen. The film has an unintentionally creepy quality to it too with a father getting one of his daughters to wear their late mothers clothes to a ball, while he demands his other teenage daughter dance with him. No amount of sad piano music is going to make this scene any less creepy.

What happened to Disney you start to ask yourself when watching this? Why is there a steampunk Morgan Freeman in this with an eye patch and a magic owl? I want to stress Mackenzie Foy is not to blame for this film not turning out well, she is a good actress, there was so much more wrong with this. Disney have no sense of what Victorian times were really like now and they are obsessed with updating old stories with historical revisionism. The chosen one trope has frankly been done to death and its getting really tiresome. There's no need to try and do a more updated version of these classic stories either. Peter Pan 2003, Cinderella 2015 and the Jungle Book 2016 were all really traditional and faithful to the source material and all were really well reviewed and received. The opening shots of London feature such bad CGI I thought this was going to be an animated Pixar movie or something but not this is a live action film apparently. Everything is so laboured and forced too, we keep needing to be told how clever our protagonist is, we can't just be allowed to see it for ourselves. Morgan Freeman doesn't even try and do an English accent, why he is American in this? The film has no idea how to build a real plausible believable heroine, in The Railway Children 1970 Roberta is revealed over the course of the film to be a kind, caring, resourceful and loving girl who chastises her brother for stealing coal, takes pity on a lost foreigner now sick, she helps to prevent a railway disaster and even finds a little romance at the end, she does this all while maintaining a quiet dignity, supportive of her mother while still desperately missing her dad. The solider character in this is terribly played, it's like they just grabbed someone off the street threw him into a costume and off he went, the line delivery is the worst, it's so wooden and stiff, like he's embarrassed to be in this film and has just realised all his mates are going to see it. The special effects are not well done and even manage to give the actors a weird appearance when they appear against it. Every thought and feeling this film has, which is not many is also so on the nose, so obvious and front and centre, our main character somehow spends much time in the snow in nothing but a thin purple dress yet never shows the slightest sign of appearing cold, never mind hyperthermia. There's not even a love story for her in this, I guess today's heroines and princesses aren't allowed a love scene, far too old fashioned for todays generation z youth. Still I can only think of her father's reaction the moment she tries to bring a boy home for tea....... I can only give this film a little praise for it's costumes and the Victorian art design at the start are nicely done but that's all.

A truly awful Disney film, about as bad as it gets. Its such a flimsy movie, there is no real character development, it doesn't explore emotions or relationships between the characters, and it completely sidesteps the darker subtext it should have explored.

Poor script that often veers towards lazy and bad. Unfocused camera shots. Uneven CGI. Film feels expensive but looks cheap. Off putting accents. Poorly paced and could use more editing. Very derivative. Poor characterization.

I have to give it its due and say that the sets, costumes, special effects, and overall aesthetic of the film are great. However...

The story is a muddle, and there's really little new and interesting here. I'm a big fan of "The Nutcracker" and its source story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, but this bears little resemblance to either. What we get a the usual tale of a troubled child going to a magic realm, turns out to be the Chosen One, fights an evil force, learns lessons, and then returns to the real world and solves her family problems quickly. We've seen this all before, and done better. It's an overfamiliar story and lacks any real heft or punch.

The acting is nothing to write home about; even stalwarts like Helen Mirren can't rise above this. But one thing that was a problem was that there's no sense of her being in a magical world, because there's really no dividing line between the look of London and the look of the Four Realms. They all have the same magical fantasy look, even the London scenes...and let's not be overly sentimental, Victorian London was a nasty, dirty place, but everything looks like an image from a Christmas card. There's a reason the Wizard of Oz had its Kansas scenes in b/w and Oz scenes in color...

And I don't get why they set the "real-world" scenes in London when everyone has German names...or how Drosselmeyer's house has vast rooms that would rival Buckingham Palace, Versailles, and London's Crystal Palace. It's absurdly immense! Drosselmeyer must be the wealthiest man on earth, and the ruler of half the world, to afford a house that monstrously huge. But that's a minor quibble.

It lost an estimated $90 million, undoubtedly in part because they released it just after Halloween, a bizarre decision that reminds me of how they released their Eddie Murphy "Haunted Mansion" movie for Christmas...these folks don't understand timing, it seems. But also, while it has its fans, people just weren't interested. Too bad.

If they really wanted to do something different, actually adapt the original tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann, which is NOT the ballet, and has moments that are surreal and dark. It's an interesting story, and Hoffmann's works in general are worth looking into. The ballet "Coppelia" is also based on Hoffmann, as well as Offenbach's opera "Tales of Hoffmann".

By the way...The name of the ballet is "The Nutcracker," not "The Nutcracker Suite." "The Nutcracker Suite" is a concert piece made of highlights from the music, but is not the whole soundtrack of the ballet. A handy hint is that if you hear the music and see people dancing on stage, then it's "The Nutcracker." If you hear the music and nobody's dancing and you just see people playing instruments, then it's "The Nutcracker Suite."

As a critic once said of "Batman and Robin" there is no writing, acting, or directing to speak of. The only thing you can appreciate as you leave the cinema is the amount of market research and test screenings they must have done to make this. A film every bit as lifeless as the CGI tin soldiers and as artful as a skunk rotting on the side of a highway.

For years Hoffman's work had several adaptations, among them the most famous of the composer Tchaikovsky presented in the Russian Ballet. The Nutcracker and the Four Realms try to make their own story, but fail miserably. The film looks like a patchwork of other films. Making it a confusing and unsatisfactory plot. The plot was tedious and without surprises. There is no plot and character development, everything runs rushed and incomplete. If it occurs in Victorian London, please follow the era. There is no funny scene. Laugh at some scenes for another reason. Most characters have no charisma whatsoever, everything they do sounds forced and unenthusiastic. Blame the writers and the direction. I love Kiera Knightley, but that was her worst performance (it was painful to watch). The CGI was overused, making all the landscapes fake, and the costumes I found extravagant. In addition to several useless scenes that filled the minutes ... what a waste of time. There are other better adaptations than that. What lacked in that film was coherence, magic and passion. What I see here is another blockbuster thirsty for money. Good thing that was bad at the box office. Give 3 for the production effort.

This was just hard to watch. Took my 10 year old out for her birthday and she chose this. Bad acting, terrible dialogue, just beyond lame. I could hardly stand the horriblr script, I even had to get up and go stretch my legs by the entrance. When you sit there just waiting for the predictable end to come, you know you have wasted money and precious time. Save your precious resources.

It started making no sense since the moment she goes into the realms. She basically enters another dimension (since time runs faster in the realms) without a portal. She just climbs some stairs and open some doors and goes into another dimension ... Big transitions through scenes transmitted no emotions

Is it truly worth the time, funds and effort to produce films if they are not something unique or maybe pushing the bounds a little, or throwing us a little uniqueness? The nutcracker was sweet but lacked real heart, uniqueness and a memorable feeling. Having watched attentively (with effort to keep up the attention) I couldn't help feel that I was straining to stay interested and waiting for the meaningful events or punchline to kick in. It seems we have become okay with mediocre but still expensive entertainment. Hopefully movie makers will continue to strive to entertain and not simply regurgitate ideas as this film sadly did. Either way, a big big thanks to the actors and entire army of people that strove to produce this pretty film! The ballet was wonderful and the racial diversity of the actors was great:)

The father/daughter relationship made me cringe. Something about it didn't sit well for me and I've never felt this way about a movie. It was almost as if the dad felt like Clara replaced the mother. On top of that the storyline kind of flits about like a bee aimlessly buzzing around on its day off. It really doesn't make much sense.

Anywho, Disney bombed with this one. How did Helen get roped into making this? And Keira surely must have had it in her contract to make one last movie for Disney. Both ladies seemed to call it in. Disney rarely bombs, but when they do it's epic. This was no exception.

It's no secret that most movies with over 100M budget lack of quality scenarios. It's like they don't even try.

Nutcracker is no exception which makes it even worse. You have very specifically written book, that even a complete antytalent would be hard to miss when turning into script. So I have to ask how did they managed to do exactly that?

You turned a great story in to a pile of rubish. You wasted money. You wasted my time. You wasted an opportunity for someone more competent to do better job.

It was so hard to miss with this one but you have managed to surprise me.

Saddly, in spite of a stellar cast and beautiful visuals, this film is pretty much a disaster. It is an insult to the music and the true meaning of the ballet.