Johnny Depp - The Mad Hatter
Mia Wasikowska - Alice
Helena Bonham Carter - The Red Queen
Anne Hathaway - The White Queen
Crispin Glover - Stayne- The Knave Of Hearts
Matt Lucas - Tweedledee/Tweedledum
Michael Sheen - The White Rabbit
Stephen Fry - The Cheshire Cat
Alan Rickman - The Blue Caterpillar
Barbara Windsor - The Dormouse
Paul Whitehouse - The March Hare
Timothy Spall - Bayard
Marton Csokas - Charles Kingsleigh
Tim Pigott-Smith - Lord Ascot
I admit, when I first heard Tim Burton was doing a new take on Alice In Wonderland, I was interested. And, when I heard Johnny Depp would be the Mad Hatter, I was even more interested.
As I heard the details regarding what this take on the classic fractured fairy tale would be like, that interest kept growing. An adult Alice returns to a Wonderland where everything has gone wrong. Characters she met on her first trip are different, twisted. Seriously, what's not to love about this concept?
We've all seen American McGee's take on Alice and Wonderland in the famously dark and twisted game released by EA.
So imagine my surprise when I finally sat down to watch what I had been promised (via an advertising barrage that only Disney could orchestrate) would be a darker and much more twisted Wonderland, and found that it was largely more of the same. And by "the same" I'm talking about Disney's first take on the Lewis Carrol classic, not the delightfully twisted game.
I suppose, for those who haven't seen it, a quick recap of the premise is in order here. (Spoiler alert for those who haven't seen it and still want to.)
Alice Kingsleigh has suffered from a recurring nightmare since she was a little girl. Every time, it's the same one. She's falling down a hole. Her father, entrepreneur Charles Kingsleigh, assures her it's just a dream. When she asks if she's going mad, he assures her she is but that, "all the best people are."Fast forward about 13 years. She's now 19 and still having the same dream. Unfortunately, her father has long since died and she's left with a mother who doesn't understand her. During a party, which we find out later is because a borish (and boring) young man is about to ask her to marry him, she suddenly sees a white rabbit. Although that's not particularly suspicious, this one's wearing a blue waistcoat and carrying a pocket watch.
Anyway, one thing leads to another and, sure enough, Alice takes a header down the rabbit hole, straight into a Wonderland that is at once familiar and different.
We find out almost immediately that the dream she's been having is, in truth, not a dream. It is a memory. The White Rabbit went up to find her, because only The Alice can save Underland. (As it turns out, the child Alice mispronounced the name on her first visit.) The only problem? There's concern about whether or not this Alice is actually The Alice. When asked, the caterpillar simply states that she's Not Hardly Alice.
The story progresses. We find old friends (the Mad Hatter, March Hare and Dormouse are still having a tea party, although it turns out this time they are simply waiting for Alice's return to set things right) and new enemies (Stayne, the Knave of Hearts is now the Red Queen's right hand man).The Mad Hatter is absolutely certain Alice is The Alice, although he does add to the confusion by claiming she was once much more muchier, and that she has lost her muchiness.
Through all this we learn that Alice must slay the the Jabberywocky on the Fraptuous Day. (As it turns out, this isn't just a nonsense poem. It's very real.)
Well, one thing leads to a hundred more and we find Alice ultimately realizing the truth (that we've known from the second she landed) and accepting that she is, in fact, The Alice, and that she has been here before. But she still fights against the idea of having to slay the Jabberwocky with the Vorpal Sword.
Ultimately, of course, she does become the White Queen's champion and she slays the Jabberwocky, the Red Queen's champion, and frees Underland from the big headed tyrant.
The special effects were amazingly well done. Let it never be said that Tim Burton doesn't know how to put on an eye candy extravaganza.
But there were major problems with the movie. The pacing was off. Some moments dragged as if the script had gotten lost and nobody had quite known what to do next. Other moments were so frenetic that it almost looked like the writer had a bad case of ADHD and was doped on speed.
The nonsense we all love about the Lewis Carroll classic, and which the original Disney cartoon was faithful to, was lost. Burton had a linear story he wanted to tell, and the true nature of Wonderland was lost as a result. That was perhaps his first major crime.The characters were familiar, but they weren't right. The Mad Hatter rarely made any nonsensical comments, even though he never made a comment that wasn't during her first trip. The Red Queen practically whispered when compared to how we knew her back then, and the other characters were all similarly altered.
And then we come to what is, in my modest opinion, Burton's biggest sin of all. He borrowed, liberally and obviously, from every modern fantasy movie he could find. Elements from The Lord Of The Rings, SyFy's Tin Man, even The Chronicles Of Narnia all made blatant appearances in this movie without so much as a mention.
How about that scene where, approaching the Red Queen's castle, Alice has to walk across a marsh filled with the heads of the Queen's victims? "Hurrying forward again, Sam tripped, catching his foot in some old root or tussock. He fell and came heavily on his hands, which sank deep into sticky ooze, so that his face was brought close to the surface of the dark mere. There was a faint hiss, a noisome smell went up, the lights flickered and danced and swirled. For a moment the water below him looked like some window, glazed with grimy glass, through which he was peering. Wrenching his hands out of the bog, he sprang back with a cry. 'There are dead things, dead faces in the water,' he said with horror. 'Dead faces!' Gollum laughed. 'The Dead Marshes, yes, yes: that is their name,' he cackled. 'You should not look in when the candles are lit.'" (The Lord Of The Rings: The Twin Towers)
It's not that he borrowed from other sources. It's that he did it so blatantly, without making any apology or excuse.
Combine that with a fairly pedestrian plot, and you have a movie that never even approached, let alone came close to, the promise it showed.
Visually stunning, but a major let down in every other area that mattered. As I said back when the Star Wars prequels were released- give me a movie with less WOW and more heart.
At best, I give this 2 out of 5 stars.
 |
| As I said- Visually? Stunning. A work of genius. Everything else? Pedestrian and copied. |
