Film Review – The Nutcracker and the Four Realms

As Disney prepares to launch three major live-action adaptations of animated classics in 2019 (“Dumbo,” “Aladdin,” and “The Lion King”), the studio closes 2018 with perhaps their last attempt to bring something marginally original to the screen. That’s not to suggest “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms” is a creative triumph, far from it, but the film represents the old way of Disney thinking, with the company trying to launch a fantasy franchise instead of picking up one in progress. Taking inspiration from Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland,” an E.T.A. Hoffmann short story, and Marius Petipa’s famous ballet, “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms” is a large-scale collision of the performing arts and a CGI orgy, with the production fighting for some type of storytelling clarity as it’s slowly smothered by excess. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com