Review of “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms”
November 5, 2018
“Oh, Nuts! Disney Cracks Another Classic!”
It truly is a good thing that Disney owns the Marvel and Star Wars Franchises. Not because they do a good job with them (I feel they actually ARE the evil empire portrayed in the Star Wars Universe), but for their own financial sake. They make hugely expensive catastrophes year after year. I present, “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms.” The main realm being: FAIL. And why is it always the “real” classics that get destroyed? Oxymoronically, Disney markets almost every new release as “already a classic,” but when they get their hands on a classic, it’s doomed to tragedy. I assume the board meetings go something like: “We can bring shit loads of visual prowess and effects to the old story of fill-in-the-blank. Let’s do it. It’s sure to be a hit.” Just like a “Wrinkle in Time” which was a wrinkle in sanity, The Nutcracker gets cracked, goes nuts, fill-in-pun here. What I don’t understand is, with the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars spent producing these flashy leviathans, why aren’t the scripts at least coherent? I would be hard pressed to connect more money with a better script, but, seriously, folks. Let’s at least get a referee in there if you have so many writers that the shooting script reads as though it were shot out of a blunderbuss and reassembled at random. Loosely based on the 19th century Tchaikovsky ballet, The Nut revolves around a teenage girl who stumbles into a fantastical world that ushers forth her inner heroin. As with countless Disney fare, the mother is dead on arrival, and our hero, Clara, is still grieving her loss, and her father is confused as to how to be a father to his three children. Clara exclaims, “The real world just doesn’t make sense anymore,” so, she’s immediately and magically dispatched to a realm that make far less sense than the real world. The only thing recognizable is the score. Just as a camel is a horse designed by a committee, Nutcracker is assembled by too many cooks and directed by two directors, both with hit or miss productions in their wake. And you gotta admire if not love how Disney brings forth and payrolls high level actors to be shackled to these bloated productions, as though it will give the thing enough cred and marketing buoyancy to lift a lead blimp. For the price-tag on train wrecks like this, Disney could take less risk to uncover and fund twenty fresh artists with their screenplays and new visions. Instead, they beat an ancient horse (that was doing just fine, thank you) with a golden bat. The Mouse is starting to have the anti-Midas-touch with many, many projects these days. Even the last Star Wars film, “Solo,” tanked in the wake of the uproar and outcry from die-hard fans after the release of “The Last Jedi.” Truly, the emperor has no cloths. Copyright 2018 LightForm Productions, Bill Lae