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Mackenzie Foy embodies a teenage girl driven into a magical parallel world where she meets Keira Knightley as a sugar fairy in the new Disney tale and ballet adored.
Disney's attempt to fight E.T.A. Hoffmann's 1816 story and Tchaikovsky's popular perpetual ballet in a fairy tale with a modern attitude are like one of those richly decorated large butter cream cakes that have air delicious but that can make you very sick. Something else Nutcracker and the Four Kingdoms We remember these mechanized windows of the big holiday shops, stuffed with so many loaded things that you can barely grasp them before an odious child behind you encourages you to keep the line moving. The sumptuous graphics have attracted so much attention that the story and the characters are suffocated.
Big budget fantasy certainly makes screen painting and can appeal to pre-teen girls, especially baby bunheads who love the ballet version. But it's a Frankenstein monster. It lacks the captivating charms of Disney's live-action remakes Cinderella and The beauty and the Beast, or the fabulous distraction of Angelina Jolie who kept the revisionist The Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent, semi-entertaining. It's more like the screaming, exhausting Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland and his unbeatable suite, borrowing elements from everywhere, without ever asking himself the question of what kind of film he wants to be.
The quality of the schizoid is perhaps not surprising given the inconsistent styles of the two filmmakers who share the same credit director. Lasse Hallstrom, the reliable pedestrian, completed the essential, before Joe Johnston intervened for in-depth shots, presumably to reinforce the action led by the CG. A similar scenario seems to be happening with the screenplay, with Hallstrom working according to the original screenplay of newcomer Ashleigh Powell and Johnston incorporating additional elements written by an uncredited Tom McCarthy.
To put it bluntly, history is a complicated mess, sometimes moving towards interesting developments, but almost always in a frantic direction before a lasting implication can be realized. Filmmakers seem aware that it's a problem, plunging the action into an almost incessant stream of lush music that mixes Tchaikovsky to James Newton Howard. Supersaturation is the default setting.
The best thing about the movie is the young lead Mackenzie Foy in the role of Clara, a 14 year old Victorian girl with the strong logistical spirit of a budding engineer. She is brave enough and determined to appeal to contemporary sensibilities, but not so much that she does not pull you from the old world reality that founds history. And Keira Knightley brings a mischievous camp spirit to the Sugar Plum fairy, slipping around him crowned by a succession of cotton candy curls and expressing a gasping squeak until and what She reveals her petulant side, not quite unexpected. If the character design owes something to Effie Trinket of Elizabeth Banks in the Hunger Games series, well, it's a film that constantly reminds you of higher inspirations. It also flutters on dragonfly wings, as does Tinkerbell.
In the opening sequence, we are in Harry Potter territory as an owl rises and floats on Olde London Town, or in an essentially computerized version of it, defining the Christmas scene by means of a huge decorated tree located in a public square. Clever Clara Stahlbaum and her younger brother Fritz (Tom Sweet) are in the attic of the family home. They use toys and respect the laws of physics to create a complicated mouse trap, heralding a key plot point later.
It's Christmas Eve and the distant and sad father of the children (Matthew Macfadyen) calls them downstairs to introduce them to the gifts that Marie recently left them (Anna Madeley). Clara receives an egg-shaped music box adorned with a cryptic note from her mother: "All you need is inside." But the box is locked, without a key.
Much of this initial setup has a pleasantly outdated feel, with the excellent Macfadyen suggesting to explore deep emotions. The arrival of the family at the annual Christmas Eve Ball also brims with visual splendor, while Linus Sandgren's camera reveals a breathtaking picture of couples wearing the impressive adornment Time of costume designer Jenny Beavan, spinning on a dance floor with romantic accents of "Waltz of flowers". "But as soon as Morgan Freeman appears, in a familiar fashion of" benevolent, wise and caring geezer "while the host of the evening, Drosselmeyer, the movie gets bored more and more, the l? aesthetic gets tired.
Drosselmeyer, inventor of fantastic gadgets, is Clara's godfather. He raised Mary after his orphan at a very young age. Rather than just handing out Christmas gifts at the ball, he traditionally organizes a treasure hunt canvas with gold threads with the names of each child present. Clara's lead leads her into a snowy parallel world where time goes much faster – there are a lot of watchmaking mechanisms, at the Hugo. She finds the key to the music box, which is quickly captured by a mouse.
She meets a strategic ally in Captain Phillip Hoffman, a Nutcracker soldier apparently brought to life, although Jayden Fowora-Knight's wooden performance scarcely ignores him. Phillip informs Clara that Mary was the queen of kingdoms, making her the princess. He warns her not to follow the thieving mouse into the dangerous Fourth Kingdom, but Clara is fearless even when she is pursued by a rodent infestation that takes the mammoth form of the Mouse King. She also had her first contact with mother Ginger (Helen Mirren), banned, whose hideous hiding inside a giant mechanical figurine in a big circus tent gown is straight out of The Wizard of Oz.
Phillip takes Clara to the palace where the kingdoms are controlled, which designer Guy Hendrix Dyas interprets as an architectural mix of Russian exteriors, a high quality oriental courtyard and European interiors, to like the hodgepodge of movie styles. They make their way through a pair of palace guards (Omid Djalili and Jack Whitehall) bickering like dumb boyfriends, in a tiring shtick that falls flat, like much of the tense comedy. Clara meets three regents: Hawthorne (Eugenio Derbez) from the land of flowers; Shiver (Richard E. Grant), land of snowflakes; and Knightley's Sugar Plum, the country of cavities. I mean candy.
Because filmmakers probably felt compelled to include the Nutcracker Ballet in some form, the action goes into presentation speed. Sugar Plum tells a dance performance of the four kingdoms, with Misty Copeland pirouetting among the sets of picture books from the Victorian era. Copeland is a sublime dancer, but this interlude stops the story, the problem being reflected in the decision to cut Clara and Sugar Plum floating above the realms in a hot air balloon. However, Clara learns that the exile of the fourth regent, Mother Ginger, started a war and that the other regents turn to their new princess to stop him. Recover the key is the key.
There is a lot continues here, with a group of overqualified actors struggling to make a strong impression under their makeup and their baroque afterlife. Grant may have the hardest job stuck behind his ice cube beard, but at least he stays sober, unlike Mexican comedian Derbez. Watch Mirren do his carnival pirate trick, with the face of a broken porcelain doll and a crew of scary clown grimaces, should be funny. But even when the real villain is revealed and the platoons of lead soldiers acquire a threatening and life-size animated form, the stakes are never very important. The story stubbornly lacks excitement or enchantment; it's more aggressive, to the point of becoming dull.
True to Disney's manual, it's inevitable that Clara learns to keep her mother's mind, to be sensitive to her father's loss, to believe in magic as much as to science and to trust to his own intelligent instincts in difficult situations. But apart from the beautiful presence of Foy on the screen, the human heart of the film is lost amidst all the foolishness, schmaltz action and febrile, but strangely distanced.
Clearly, it was a prestigious project, as evidenced by the recruitment of Gustavo Dudamel to achieve the score and make a brief appearance in front of the camera (possibly with reference Fancy), as well as a piano solo presented by Lang Lang. Then there is again the bonus Copeland, dancing on the end credits with Sergei Polunin. But it would take more than a corps de ballet and a complete orchestra to infuse class and cohesion to this unsuccessful miss.
Production Companies: The Mark Gordon Company, Walt Disney Pictures
Distributor: Disney
Keira Knightley, Mackenzie Foy, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman, Eugenio Derbez, Richard E. Grant, Jayden Fowora-Knight, Matthew Macfadyen, Ellie Bamber, Thomas Sweet, Omid Djalili, Whitehall Jack, Misty Copeland, Sergue Polunin, Anna Madeley
Directors: Lasse Hallstrom, Joe Johnston
Writers: Ashleigh Powell, suggested by the new The nutcracker and the king of mice, by E.T.A. Hoffmann; and the Nutcracker Ballet, by Marius Petipa
Producers: Mark Gordon, Larry Franco
Executive Producers: Sara Smith, Lindy Goldstein
Director of Photography: Linus Sandgren
Production Designer: Guy Hendrix Dyas
Costume Designer: Jenny Beavan
Music: James Newton Howard
Publisher: Stuart Levy
Visual Effects Supervisor: Max Wood
Choreographer: Liam Scarlett
Cast: Lucy Bevan
Filed PG, 99 minutes
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