This review may contain spoilers.

This movie is bad. It's not, like, so bad it's good bad, it's worse. Because you kinda enjoy so bad they're good movies. This is not that. It's just astoundingly awful for how high budget and polished it is. It looks like it should be good, but it just... Isn't. I don't even know where to begin. I'm still shocked from last night by how terrible this film is.

I suppose we should start with the original German story, in which a girl named Marie is gifted a Nutcracker for Christmas and the next morning, wakes up in another world. In this movie, she's gifted a fuckin' egg? And the egg needs a key to be opened. Okay, but on Christmas Day she's given another gift... And this one is just a string that leads into a hallway that suspiciously has no door and leads to the other world. What? How has no one ever noticed such a thing? So her brother is also given another gift. We know this because he runs by her and says he has a nutcracker and it's her boyfriend. Said nutcracker is on screen for about two seconds. When the girl, in this adaptation named Clara, as she is in many other Nutcracker adaptations, stumbles into the dark forest of the alternate realm, she meets a nutcracker soldier. I'm going to hold off on explaining how bad this all is after I'm done explaining the plot, because my explanation will require knowledge of it all.

Anyway, he escorts her through the forest, and they encounter the villain of the story and ballet, the Mouse King. Only this Mouse King is just a big ol' anthropomorphic mouse made up of hundreds of other mice. He appears one other time in the story for about thirty seconds. This character is actually controlled by the big bad, Mother Ginger, who is not a character in the original story.

They make it out alive and get to the kingdom, at which point the guardians of the other three titular realms explain to her how cool their worlds are, without the film ever exploring them at all, instead preferring to keep the setting of the movie entirely in a bland, gloomy forest. They explain that her mother, whose name is *Marie*, created this world with a sci-fi machine that doesn't fit into the high fantasy angle they're going for. But in order to make more soldiers with it, they need a key, and it's the same one that fits into the egg. But Mother Ginger has it.

So Clara and the Nutcracker, Phillip, lead a small army of wooden soldiers back into the forest and long story short, they battle Mother Ginger and get the key back. They return to Sugar Plum, the leader of the Realm of Sweets, who creates tin soldiers with the key and sends her and the other guardians into an extremely unguarded jail cell that just has an ungated terrace leading back down onto the castle and a rope. See, she wants to kill Mother Ginger with war, which Clara disagrees with.

So at this point, I'm thinking, okay, so now there's an evil villain and a moral villain, and the conflict is going to be resolving the feud without violence. But no, apparently Ginger did "nothing wrong" and Sugar Plum was the instigator of the entire war. But it's never explained what she did, why everyone follows her, or what's up with Mother Ginger. No background is ever given to this. It feels either heavily cut down, or just not thought through, and it's a GIANT plot hole. It literally makes no fucking sense. Who the fuck wrote this movie? Well, imbeciles, clearly, considering every word uttered sounds forced and awkward, especially those coming from Morgan Freeman.

So obviously, due to ths extreme plot contrivance that is a completely open chamber, they get out and defeat Sugar Plum, the real villain of the story, with the help of Mother Ginger, and Clara gets back home. Oh, also, inside the egg was a mirror because all she needed was herself. Okay, Disney, whatever you say.

So, this movie is BRUTALLY inaccurate to the source material. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is in this case. Making the Sugar Plum Fairy the true villain is actually a genius idea, but it's done sooo poorly. This is one of those movies the director will defend by saying it's a "deconstruction", but by definition deconstructive works have to actually, well, deconstruct something. Say something new about the work they're adapting. But this says nothing interesting at all, and is just different for the sake of being different. The main character's name is Clara, and her mother's name is Clara's original name, Marie. So this sort of implies that the original story is canon to this movie, except every other character's names and relationships to Clara remain the same. And in the original, Marie didn't fucking create the four realms with a sci-fi machine.

This movie was so obsessed with building this high fantasy lore and deep background to everything (despite it making no goddamn sense), that it forgot it's called The Nutcracker. The nutcracker in the real world is shown for about five seconds, and the nutcracker in the Four Realms is completely irrelevant to the story and has absolutely no purpose in the narrative. He's just tagging along because he has to, and every once in a while, the director remembers he's supposed to be the center of the story. They also do not have any romance in the end, despite the blatant foreshadowing at the beginning. Hell, the point of the original story is that he's a fignment of her imagination, and dreams are just build-ups of things Clara sees in the real world, hence the nutcracker. Maybe it's not a dream, though, it's supposed to be open ended. But in this, it is clearly not a dream, because she literally walks right into the Realms, a transition that does not exist in the source material.

Moreover, there's no reason for Mother Ginger to even exist. You'd think there would be a purpose of her being a bigger bad than the Mouse King or something, but why isn't the Mouse King just the Fourth Realm ruler? Why did they need a new villain if she was going to just turn good anyway? Wouldn't the deconstruction actually work *better* if the bad guy turned out to be the good guy, and the goodest of good was actually the true villain? It would be much better to say something, *anything* that way. Here, watch, I'll make a theme right now: "Don't judge others." Or how about, "There is no black and white to the real world, only various shades of grey"? But no, this movie is about nothing. There is no theme.

Now, tell me if you've ever heard this plot outline before: Girl in dress during the Victorian era lives in London and is shunned and misunderstood by her family due to her recent depression. She goes into a literal hole even though in the original story it was up to interpretation whether or not the plot is a dream, and goes to a magical realm in which anything can happen, divided into different kingdoms. She fights the original villain briefly, but then it's revealed that the original story is sort of kind of canon but a technically different version of it because it's too far removed from the source material and causes too many continuity problems to just say the original is canon, but it all happened in the distant past. Additionally, said world is now dark, run down, and the different kingdoms are at war with each other. The traditional villain is revealed to not actually be the instigator of the war, while another, bigger enemy is revealed that vaguely tries to deconstruct the source material but fails at it, losing all of the thematic integrity the source had.

That's right, folks: it's literally Alice in Wonderland directed by Tim Burton. It's the same movie. I mean, when the first teaser released everybody said this because of the trope of turning a children's story dark with beautiful visuals, but I was like, nah, that happens a lot, it's not the same thing.

It's the same thing. Structurally, the plot is the exact same. It makes you wonder why they didn't just make a third Alice in Wonderland movie.

And yeah, I was REALLY excited for this to begin with. The trailers looked gorgeous, I was really into it. The sound editing seemed really good and I was down for a more high fantasy setting of The Nutcracker. But this happens *all the time* with live action Disney IPs, and it hurts me. Beautiful trailer with great sound design comes out about a classic book/story and presents itself as something a little more than you usually get from Disney, but it actually turns out to be a poorly written, badly acted, inaccurate mess of ideas that never coherently flow together. This is actually worse than Narnia, or A Wrinkle in Time, or any of that, though. This is ASTONISHINGLY bad for what a high budget, AAA movie it is. This isn't Unfriended: Dark Web bad, it's Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom bad: there's no enjoyment in it, it's just really, really bad, and I never want to see it again. It's aggravatingly horrible. Don't see this film.