★ 7 / 10
I watched this back-to-back with the newer (as
jesseyu
I watched this back-to-back with the newer (as of January, 2019) Nutcracker movie (The Nutcracker and the Four Realms [2018]) and I liked this one better as it…
I watched this back-to-back with the newer (as of January, 2019) Nutcracker movie (The Nutcracker and the Four Realms [2018]) and I liked this one better as it is more attuned for kids and as my 10-year-old said, it's more "Christmassy" than the Four Realms one.
I can understand the low ratings as maybe those who rated this low might have been expecting a holiday movie and was turned off by the heavily sci-fi and dystopian society renderings. Well, for me it wasn't that bad. I wasn't expecting anything as I never knew about any of the original Nutcracker story that this might have been based on or haven't seen a Nutcracker ballet performance. I just wanted to watch a holiday movie with my family and this looked okay. Story seemed simple and child-friendly enough that I wouldn't give this one a bad rating. And comparing this to the more recent Nutcracker movie which we watched after this one, the new one was from Disney and was obviously budgeted a lot more with bigger stars so we were sort of expecting a lot more. But we were let down by the newer offering as the plot was severely lacking excitement there. It was boring. And in the end, hard to care for. This one at least, for me and my boy, offered a bit of excitement and action and got us a bit more invested in while watching. Rating: 7/10
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★ 3 / 10
Indeed. This story should NEVER have been told.
MrPaull0324
The Nutcracker by Pyotr Tchaikovsky is arguably the most famous and cherished ballet ever created and there have been countless adaptations of it. And…
The Nutcracker by Pyotr Tchaikovsky is arguably the most famous and cherished ballet ever created and there have been countless adaptations of it. And "Nutcracker 3D" is probably the worst one of all.First off, I did some research on the original ballet from 1892, and there's a limited amount of material from it to make a movie to begin with. As a result, expanding on the story is required to create a proper Nutcracker film. But even so, Tchaikovsky's work is eviscerated here. The film bears little resemblance to the Nutcracker story. Elle Fanning plays a Clara stand-in named Mary. Uncle Drosselmeyer is replaced by Albert Einstein (Nathan Lane) for some reason. The story takes place in early 20th century Austria instead of the correct 19th century Germany, but even then, nobody speaks with an Austrian accent. And, finally, the Nutcrackers world is turned into a steampunk styled kingdom. It's all so different, you'd be forgiven for initially thinking this isn't even a Nutcracker adaptation.No question, the main reason this film was so panned was because it was essentially an allegory to the Holocaust by portraying the rats as Nazis and showing them systematically exterminating living toys by burning them in factories or in public to block out the sun and publish and spread propaganda about a RATification policy. This portrayal of the rats was unnecessarily morbid and in very poor taste. I'm all for teaching kids about the Holocaust, but this just made the film too dark and disturbing for such an audience.Nazi imagery aside, this film was chock full of disturbing scenes that would terrify children. The poorly rendered CGI model of the Nutcracker himself looked very creepy with his bulging, lifeless eyes and flapping head, and the Rat King's face morphing and showing his prominent teeth and gums was the stuff of nightmares. And that's not all; we see a Shark being electrocuted to death in a big fish tank, the Rat King decorating his fortress with photographs of sobbing children, and Sticks (Africa Nile), the drummer boy, gets his head ripped off so the Rat King and his soldiers can play catch with it! What was Konchalovsky thinking?!The acting and dialogue were poor for the most part and few of the characters were likeable. I know she was very young at the time, but Elle Fanning tended to speak in a bored sounding monotone, Max (Aaron Michael Drozin) was an irritating brat who liked to break toys, and Shirley Henderson performed the Nutcracker with an annoying high-pitched voice and tended to be rude and dismissive toward Mary. Nathan Lane's fake German accent fools nobody. Only John Turturro was fun to watch with his wacky villain performance, even though he's playing an Adolf Hitler/Andy Warhol hybrid dictator.But worst of all, the Nutcrackers prolific songs that everyone knows and loves, like the "Nutcracker Suite", "Sugarplum Fairy", and "Waltz of the Flowers" are all butchered with the addition of God-awful lyrics from Tim Rice and bad singing. There wasn't even any ballet dancing. It's all so distorted and jarring, it feels like a slap in the face to fans of the original work.Visually, though, the magical world that Mary dreams up actually looks pretty good. From the buildings and city streets of the Nutcrackers kingdom to the interior and exterior of the Rat Kings steampunk castle everything looked impressive. The costumes looked nice too, if you don't count the rats Nazi uniforms. The steampunk technology, like the helicopter, robotic dogs, and motorcycles were cool, even if they felt out of place in a Nutcracker film. They really could have created something better than this if they'd left the darkest elements out.Overall, I was surprised and disappointed that Andrei Konchalovsky was behind this, seeing as how he won a Primetime Emmy for creating "The Odyssey" miniseries back in 1997, which I enjoyed. Plus, with a $90 million budget to work with, he could have done better if he'd been more faithful to the ballets source material, had a lighter and more kid friendly story, and steer clear of any Nazi imagery. But the saddest part of all is that for twenty years this was his dream project, but how he thought mixing it with the Holocaust was a good idea is beyond me, because he wound up creating not only the worst Nutcracker adaptation of all time, but also one of the worst Christmas films ever.
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4.1/10
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