On Monday Nov. 5, I finally got to see “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms” with my mom. I usually don’t see movies in the theater like I used to, especially during the semester. But sometimes I make exceptions and actually go out and do something if my week workload is light enough. Despite the mixed reviews, I didn’t think it was bad. I had an idea of what to expect based off of its 34 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. The thing about this movie that, I think, is the root problem, resulting in it getting slammed by all these not-so-good reviews, is that people must be going in there expecting it to be the same as the the ballet written by Petipa and Tchaikovsky, adapted from the story by E.T.A. Hoffmann. Since this is one of those classics everybody grows up seeing at least once during their childhood, their expectations are naturally high. I’ve actually seen it a couple times myself as a child, so I definitely can say I walked in with the same expectations I used to give the ballet: Oh, this is a Christmas movie. It’ll be just as magical! (I didn’t think just that, I’m not that naïve, but that’s the idea of the thoughts going in, at least.)

Normally I would give a short summary of what the ballet is about, but there’s really no comparison between the ballet holiday classic and the movie. If anything, the movie takes generous creative license from the premise of the plot of the ballet and uses that to create a modern re-imagining. It still has the key characters, Klara (Mackenzie Foy) to the Sugarplum Fairy (Keira Knightley), of course.

The movie starts off the same as the ballet, on Christmas Eve, but there is some modernization done with the family that give it a bit of a twist. There’s no happy family complete with a mother and father, instead the mother recently passed away, leaving the father dejected and heartbroken. She also left three young children for him to raise on his own. But this part of the modernization uses Klara’s grief of losing her mother as a basis of the lessons she will learn in the world she is eventually led into. In this world, apparently her mother had once ruled, but left to go back to her and the family.

Love Morgan Freeman and will watch anything just to hear that voice? That’s another reason to give this movie a view. He’s a big enough character in helping Klara figure out what she needs to do in order to help a world all but falling apart having lost their leader, her mother, just as she had, and equally torn apart as a consequence by war. And while Klara is an ingenious, clever young girl, there are a few times in the beginning where she needs his help to put two and two together, but even then, she doesn’t need much help and it doesn’t take long for her to continue with her quest regardless.

Knightley also plays a superb evil villain in the form of the deranged Sugarplum Fairy whose lofty ambitions don’t quite reach us until it’s too late. While the ending wraps up a little too quickly in its semi-anti-climactic throw-down, it does bring us back to the beginning of the movie with a nostalgic touch, just reminiscent of the play.