The Nutcracker and the Four Realms Wastes Immature Joke from Title

The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018)

The Nutcracker and the Four Realms was a disaster of a film that will be appreciated by small children and people who haven’t seen many movies. The dissonance just in the quality of CGI was astounding for such a big budget movie. The landscapes were magnificent, but the character models, particularly the tin soldiers, were amateurish. The gist of the movie is that a girl whose mother just passed away is upset that her father, whose wife just passed away, expects her to behave at a Christmas party hosted by her godfather. She then gets lost in a magical world created by her mother that is filled with people dressed like Caesar Flickerman from The Hunger Games and act like the Munchkins from Wizard of Oz. It turns out that her mother is a crazy inventor and now the girl has to save that world that her mother invented. Every twist you expect to happen does happen. Every character arc is inverted. The movie is filled with great actors who have had magnificent performances throughout their careers, but are just awful in this movie. Helen Mirren is a paper-thin regent of one of the four realms, who is supposed to be interesting because she has a scar on her face, but Mirren is just going through the motions for a paycheck. And Morgan Freeman is even worse. The story takes place in 1800s London, and every other actor is British, but Freeman, who plays the super-rich godfather, just talks in his normal voice, as if he can’t be bothered to be anything except a sage old man at this point in his career. Keira Knightley actually did act in the movie, but it was terrible and over the top. Even the titular character, the Nutcracker played by nobody Jayden Fowora-Knight, looked like he was reading all of his lines. The only quality performance was by ballerina Misty Copeland, who is brilliant. In fact, she is the only reason to see this movie. Her dancing is magnificent, and she deserves every accolade she gets. I hope that she got paid more than everyone else in this movie, because she truly deserves it. Overall, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms was a waste of just under two hours. I give The Nutcracker and the Four Realms 1 out of Pierre Beauchamp’s 5 ballet positions (or out of Serge Lifar’s 7 positions).