I watched this back-to-back with the newer (as of January, 2019) Nutcracker movie (The Nutcracker and the Four Realms [2018]) and I liked this one better as it is more attuned for kids and as my 10-year-old said, it's more "Christmassy" than the Four Realms one. I can understand the low ratings as maybe those who rated this low might have been expecting a holiday movie and was turned off by the heavily sci-fi and dystopian society renderings. Well, for me it wasn't that bad. I wasn't expecting anything as I never knew about any of the original Nutcracker story that this might have been based on or haven't seen a Nutcracker ballet performance. I just wanted to watch a holiday movie with my family and this looked okay. Story seemed simple and child-friendly enough that I wouldn't give this one a bad rating. And comparing this to the more recent Nutcracker movie which we watched after this one, the new one was from Disney and was obviously budgeted a lot more with bigger stars so we were sort of expecting a lot more. But we were let down by the newer offering as the plot was severely lacking excitement there. It was boring. And in the end, hard to care for. This one at least, for me and my boy, offered a bit of excitement and action and got us a bit more invested in while watching. Rating: 7/10

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