I thought this was The Nutcracker. It was almost exclusively the Four Realms.
After all Disney's wins lately, it was bound to crash at some point. The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is that point. Pretty enough to look at but utterly void of substance, the fantasy adventure feels like a thoughtless mash-up of other (better) ideas. A young girl follows her curiosity through an old man's mansion and into a wintry wonderland and meets a sentient rodent; that's straight outta Narnia. The highly stylized magical world features arbitrary characters and places that seem to be at war with each other; it feels often like Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. And when the regents of the realms attempt to claim power while the misfits fight the good fight, I was distinctly reminded of Oz, the Great and Powerful.
Not that these are bad comparisons; rather, The Nutcracker is the failure here. Its dull story is mired in waste, begging its own spectacle to make up for the doldrums. Dripping in eye-popping visual effects, the film lurches from set piece to green screen, uncertain of its focus or even its own sense of fun. The only enjoyment I received from the film came in the form of its costumes, which are lovely to behold. Those, and the brief moment when Keira Knightley, lilting as the sweet Sugar Plum, turns to the camera and pulls cotton candy out of her hair and eats it. That moment was pure genius.
But where is "The Nutcracker"? I don't mean the character, whose bit part here is nothing special. I mean the famous short story by E.T.A. Hoffman, or even the standard ballet? Rather than treated to a festive romp through a world of toys and mice, we are tricked into a disappointingly typical young adult fantasy adventure. We're inundated with a new vocabulary of idiotic, simplistic proper nouns for the "Four Realms" and the regents of each; it begins to feel like an attempted creation of a legendarium that will never work. It's the kind of crap that defines those B movies, usually adapted from books in the wake of better franchises, flocked to by adolescent fans who say they like to read, but really only read elementary-level writings. You know which ones I'm talking about.
Worse even than these dismal trappings, the heart of the source material is utterly gone. It's not even a fantastic re-imagining of the story. The mice play only a menial part in this story, along with the nutcracker himself, and the focus is instead on the Oz-like characters and the state of their kingdom. There are exactly two scenes of dancing: one, briefly, a ball early in the film, and one during the credits. It's the latter that matters, featuring Misty Copeland in an (also brief) artsy display of talent with a half-naked man. It's nice, but not enough to dispel the waste that comes before.
Disappointing.
IMDb: The Nutcracker and the Four Realms
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