The Nutcracker and the Four Realms was Disney’s attempt to adapt the famous ballet and the E. T. A. Hoffman novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. What the studio came up with was a cookie-cutter fantasy.
Clara Stahlbalm (Mackenzie Foy) is a tomboyish girl in Victorian London who’s interested is in science and engineering. Clara has a strained relationship with her father (Matthew Macfayden) and her deceased mother who has left Clara a metal egg that could only be unlocked by a special key. At a Christmas Eve ball, Clara gets led to a door to another world and discovers her mother was the founder world. Clara soon gets caught up with the conflict of the Four Realms.
The Nutcracker and the Four Realms was basically The Wizard of Oz and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. It had the same set-up: a young girl from our world ending up having to save a fantasy world from a great threat. The scene when Clara enters into the Four Realms was pretty much the same as when Lucy entered Narnia in Disney’s version of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.
The use of this template ended up making The Nutcracker and the Four Realms an uninspired and unoriginal fantasy film that has added nothing new to the genre. It had a screenplay that went through the motions: the plot points, the character arcs, and twists could be seen from miles. Nor did it help the film that The Nutcracker and the Four Realms used the Disney cliché where the main character was a princess with a dead parent. Jack Whitehall and Omid Djalili who played two guards who acted like a double act seemed like Disney wanted to repeat what Giles New and Angus Barnett did in the Pirates of the Caribbean series.
Like The Chronicles of Narnia, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms shows that time moves differently between the real world and the fantasy world. Time moves slowly in the real world and the film does have an effective scene when The Sugar Plum Fairy (Keira Knightley) gives Clara a little glimpse of this. And also like The Chronicles of Narnia and other fantasy films The Nutcracker and the Four Realms has ‘a chosen one’ storyline where an outsider has to save a fantasy world.
Disney also lifts from another one of their films: the 2010 version of Alice in Wonderland. Clara was similar to Alice because both were Victorian girls were didn’t fit with their societies. Both girls going into a world they’re connected to and find it has fallen into disrepair.
A film can be formulaic but still entertaining. This was sadly not the case for The Nutcracker because the characters and the story were so stock. The special features on the Blu-ray highlighted the work on the production design and the costumes and the people in these fields must have had fun working on this film. But this wasn’t enough to save the film.
In the film, the stakes felt low. Because it was set in a toy world there was no sense of risk to life, especially when the villain’s plan was revealed. This was a film for families but there still needs to be a sense that lives were in danger.
Even the biggest Keira Knightley fan would struggle with this film because her performance was irritating. She spoke in a much higher pitch than normal and it became grating incredibly quickly.
The Nutcracker and the Four Realms was a throwaway attempt at a family fantasy film that shows Disney is not infallible.
Special Features
– Two behind the scene featurette, one on the dance, the other on the set and customer design
– Two music videos
-Five deleted scenes
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Direction
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Writing
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Acting
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Special Effects
Summary
It was hardly a surprise this film was a flop.
