I haven’t seen a thread on this yet, which surprises me. This movie, the last I checked, had gotten a rating of Zero on Rotten Tomatoes, and has been condemned by every reviewer. It’s Andrei Konchalovsky’s 3D version of The Nutcracker, and it’s not hard to see why.
Virtually no ballet. They threw out most of Tchaikovsky’s music and adapted the rest to bland form, with added lyrics by Tim Rice. Nathan Lane plays the Uncle – not Drosselmeyer, but Uncle Albert, as in Einstein. It’s updated to the 1930s, and the Mice are Rat-faced Nazis.
I kid you not. Here’s the official website:
http://nutcrackerin3d.com/
Here’s the Rotten Tomatoes site, with all the negative reviews you could want:
The Wikipedia Page:
Add to this that it’s in awful 3D.
Heck, even Battlefield Earth got more positive reviews. I haven’t even seen an ad for this in the theaters or on TV.
Really strange. It might have been interesting to adapt the original story (the ballet is just an outline of the weirdness in the original), but this seems to be a pretty generic adventure fantasy.
The adaptation of the army of the Mouse King isn’t TOO much of a stretch, but for God’s sake, why the hell would you ditch the original music by Tchaikovsky? That music defines the story. It’s a character in its own right.
How does that make any sense? Just because he’s a genius doesn’t mean he would make great toys. Even if the Nutcracker has some sort of technobabble spatial portal generator or something that takes the girl to the fantasy world, Einstein was still a theorist, not an experimentalist: If he had designed something of the sort, he’d still need someone else to build it for him. And “design” is still even too strong of a word: At most, he’d come up with the basic principles, which someone else would turn into a design.
Wow. The A.V. Club says this move “…is the cinematic equivalent of a turd sprinkled with powdered sugar.”
And this can not be true: “Also, it re-envisions the Holocaust as a doll-pocalypse, as rat soldiers round up toys to burn in giant ovens whose smoke blots out the sun.”
Seriously – it’s in a lot of the reviews. And the Holocaust Imagery is undoubtedly the main reason this film has been universally condemned. The rest of the film may be poorly conceived and badly executed, but that’s just appallingly Bad Taste.