The Nutcracker in 3D is a Christmas fantasy film that’s an adaption of the ballet The Nutcracker. Starring Elle Fanning and Nathan Lane, The Nutcracker in 3D recounts the tale of the Nutcracker.
Mary, portrayed by Elle Fanning, is having a dull Christmas before her Uncle Albert, portrayed by Nathan Lane, shows up. Uncle Albert gives Mary a nutcracker for a Christmas present that Mary immediately runs off to play with. That night when Mary goes to bed, she dreams of her nutcracker.
Her nutcracker- named N.C., portrayed by Charlie Rowe, comes to life in her dream and takes her on a journey in his kingdom. In their journeys, they discover that that the Nutcracker’s kingdom has been seized by the evil Rat King, portrayed by John Turtorro, who kidnaps N.C. It falls to Mary to save N.C. in his time of need.
The Nutcracker in 3D fails to be enjoyable. It has a rating of 0% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 4.4/10 on IMDb. It earns one candy cane out of five, watching it was the equivalent of watching the Grinch steal Christmas.
The Nutcracker in 3D’s obviously geared toward a much younger audience. Yet, that didn’t make the movie any better. The special effects weren’t great and the makeup was awful. The music choice was confusing, at best. Altogether,the directors made various questionable decisions.
To go in depth the special effects were terrifying, they were so bad it was distracting. Instead of focusing on the plot, one will focus on the poorly rendered Nutcracker standing next to Elle Fanning.
The makeup didn’t give the cast a fantasy vibe the director’s were trying to get. Instead, it made the cast look relatively horrifying. The cast that played rats were given rat-like features. Their noses were broadened, their ears were pointed, and their lips were thinned and given buck teeth. The intent was to make them look more rat-like, but instead it made them uncanny and creepy.
The music was confusing. They used pieces of music from Tchaikovsky, but they warped them into musical numbers. At one point the Rat King sings about being a dictator to the background of a Tchaikovsky piece.
If all these technical aspects don’t make the movie completely appalling, the plot was ridiculously hard to follow. It seemed to jump around and not follow a specific path. Just when the plot started to make sense, the Rat King decides to show up and mess things up.
They also burst into songs at random intervals. For seemingly no reason, a Tchaikovsky song will start up and a character will burst into song. It could lead to extreme confusion among the audience.
Altogether, this movie is confusing at best and terrible at worst. The first mistake the directors made in The Nutcracker in 3D was basing it off the ballet instead of the book. The second mistake was not properly nurturing their movie to make it into something that could have been great.
The Nutcracker in 3D had great potential, and that potential was left unrecognized.
