The Nutcracker and the Four Realms / YMMV

Alternative Character Interpretation: Sugar Plum. Is she a Tragic Villain who grew bitter after feeling betrayed and abandoned by Marie, or is she a complete sociopath in search of power for its own sake who is simply using Marie's abandonment as a scapegoat?
Cliché Storm: Key to the So Okay, It's Average reception, which kept the film from getting the word of mouth that might have saved it from being a complete box office bomb, is the common opinion that there's virtually nothing in this film that hasn't been done to death by Disney (and sometimes Pixar) in The New '10s: Plucky Action Girl who doesn't want to just be a frilly princess-type despite living in a repressive society! A classic, whimsical fantasy shoehorned into a Darker and Edgier The Hero's Journey template! A Missing Mom whose absence causes angst!^note Obvious CGI Scenery Porn! The good character who turns out to have been Evil All Along with little explanation or foreshadowing!^note
Harsher in Hindsight: This marks the second poorly received The Nutcracker adaptation that Richard E. Grant appeared in after the even more poorly received The Nutcracker in 3D. Though compared to that film, which was a case of So Bad, It's Good, this film is considered to be So OK, It's Average.
- The tie-in commercials for Glade's themed candles, room freshener sprays, etc., which ended for a plug for the film's theatrical run, were airing in syndication and on cable channels like Up well after Christmas...weeks after the movie had been forced out of most theaters.
Informed Wrongness: While her reasons for doing so turned out to be quite nefarious, Clara treats Sugar Plum's order for an attack upon the Fourth Realm as though she's crossing some Moral Event Horizon just from the mere suggestion, even declaring that her own mother would never have made such a decision. Clara has received nary a single hint that Mother Ginger isn't the vile traitor she's been made out to be, and the fact that the Fourth Realm has already been abandoned means there's no risk of any civilian casualties. All of this makes her accusations come off as a flimsy excuse to out Sugar Plum as the real villain just a bit earlier than she otherwise would have.
It's the Same, Now It Sucks!:
- As pointed out in Cliché Storm above, this is yet another Disney film with a twist regarding the identity of the true villain — in this case, the Sugar Plum Fairy (who framed the Good All Along Mother Ginger). Needless to say, people are getting tired of how the company has been obsessively using this trope in their films.
- Similarly, the movie gives its lead a supposed upgrade by making her out to be a Gadgeteer Genius with a keen understanding of physics and mechanics, which Disney has already done in two of their live-action remakes: with Mowgli in The Jungle Book (where it at least tied into the premise and theme of that film) and Belle in Beauty and the Beast. The fact that this is treated as an acceptable improvement to the character of Clara Staulbam, to the point of her getting a subplot about learning to recognize her own strengths, genuinely comes off as eye-rolling in how unoriginal a concept it is at this point.
- In a rounded example here in the ballet the fact that Clara doesn't do as much is chalked up to the ballet structure, but her book counterpart was always fairly productive and intelligent and gets put through emotional situations where everyone around her thinks she is crazy. Book Marie was always pretty cool as Hoffmann wrote her, but this may be an example of a Disney film thinking they can reinvent a character better than the source and source fans saying, "huh?".
Moral Event Horizon: Despite Sugar Plum locking her, Captain Phillip, and the other regents in a tower, using the Engine on one of her own soldiers to suck the life out of him, and going on the warpath against Mother Ginger, Clara still believes she isn't beyond saving until she goes ahead and uses the Engine to try to eliminate Mother Ginger completely.
Narm: Sugar Plum's frilly, high-pitched voice can be hard to take seriously once she's outed as the villain.
Nightmare Fuel: The Matryoshka clowns will scare people who are afraid of clowns. Also, it removes its top layer to reveal all the other ones, like a real Matryoshka/nesting doll, except they are the same size. The fact that they're actually Good All Along kind of softened the blow, but they're still quite creepy.
Padding: The movie is stuffed with lengthy exposition dumps and a pointless side-adventure to reclaim Clara's key in order to fill the gaps in between its three or four significant plot developments. If it were stripped down to its barest narrative essentials, it probably wouldn't go longer than half an hour.
So Okay, It's Average: The general consensus on the movie, according to its 33% score on Rotten Tomatoes, is that while generally a forgettable holiday film, at least the visuals are aesthetically pleasing through and through and it's generally regarded as a decent film, just one which doesn't do much that's different from previous Disney films.
Spiritual Successor: Disney's pretty much picking up where Alice in Wonderland (2010) and its sequel left off with this film — turning a light fantasy about a young girl in a Magical Land into The Hero's Journey with much higher stakes, with a similar whimsical/gothic visual aesthetic.
Squick: The Rat King is a vaguely anthropomorphic mass of mice, and seeing it is not pleasant.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: It's an In Name Only version of a story that majorly departs from the book and the ballet and made by Disney. E. T. A. Hoffmann fans and ballet fans clearly weren't impressed, and some probably weren't that surprised.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: In a related issue to They Changed It, Now It Sucks! several reviewers wondered why, given how lovely the staging of the Ballet sequence led by Misty Copeland was, Disney didn't just do a straightforward film of the ballet instead of shoehorning it into their current Cliché Storm template.
- On top of that it has been commented on the idea of making Clara the daughter of Marie tries to sell an idea this is a stealth sequel to the original book or ballet's plot except for the fact that Disney doesn't play either of them straight. So if you know either story it feels like Disney is trying to seem clever making a sequel to a book they never read or a ballet they never watched completely.
Visual Effects of Awesome: One thing audiences and most critics seem to agree on is that the film's visuals are simply stunning to look at.

YMMV / The Nutcracker and the Four Realms

Edit Locked