On Friday, November 2nd, the new nutcracker movie was released in theaters. It’s the first Christmas movie this year and a lot of people were concerned about its plot line after they’ve seen the trailer because it doesn’t seem to be like the typical nutcracker story by Tschaikowski. After watching the movie I can say that those concerns aren’t justified.

The movie tells the story of Clara Stahlbaum (Mackenzie Foy), who lives in Victorian London with her father and her two siblings. Clara loves to learn new things, especially about physics and mechanisms, like her mother who had passed away recently. A day before Christmas evening her father gives her and her siblings each a special gift to fulfill his wife’s wish. Clara gets a handcrafted egg that can be opened, but she didn’t get the matching key. In the box the egg was in, she finds a note from her mother saying that everything she needs is inside. Later in the evening, the family heads to a Christmas ball, where Clara looks for her godfather (Morgan Freeman), who is an engineer, to ask for help to open the egg. He tells her that he once gifted the egg to Clara’s mother and after that they go upstairs to see the ballet.

After the show the children get to open their gifts, but to find their gift they have to follow the thread a sign with their name was on. As Clara follows her thread it leads her to a parallel world, into the Christmas tree forest. There she finds the key, yet a mouse gets the key before she can grab it. While chasing the mouse she gets to know the nutcracker Captain Phillip (Jayden Fowora-Knight) who goes with her to find the key after he realizes that Clara’s dead mother was their queen. After a dangerous chase through the Fourth Realm, the Captain takes Clara to the palace where she meets the three regents. The sugar plum fairy (Keira Knightley) tells her the whole story of their world, including how Clara’s mother built a machine to make the toys alive and how they’re missing the key for this machine. They need the machine to make an army to fight against Mother Ginger (Helen Mirren), the regent of the Fourth Realm. To get the key from Mother Ginger, Clara and the Captain return to the Fourth Realm. However, when they come back, they discover that the sugar plum fairy was not who she seemed.

I won’t write how the movie ends, for that you’ll have to watch the movie. Although this take on it doesn’t have much in common with the original The Nutcracker, it’s a great movie. I can recommend it to everybody who likes a film with a good plot twist.