Alice in Wonderland – Review

On paper, the idea of Tim Burton directing a modern live-action version of Lewis Carroll’s famous story of Alice in Wonderland seemed too good to be true. Tim Burton certainly has established himself over the years as a kooky director with his finger on weird, and even more certain, is that Alice in Wonderland is weird. The classic Disney animated film from 1951 as become a polarizing film from the Mouse House, a film one either loves entirely or one hates it entirely. Despite the fact if you like or dislike Tim Burton, the very idea presented to us with his adaptation of Alice in Wonderland was one of the most perfect marriages one could assume on paper. Notice how many times I’ve said on paper, because a Tim Burton directed version of Alice in Wonderland should not have been this ordinary.

I can’t help but wish this film came during the world’s introduction to Tim Burton back when he was doing things like Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice, because for all of the razzle dazzle of (and if you see it in) IMAX 3-D, the film is largely flat and dare I say, boring. One of the sole problems with the film is that there’s little actually going on. Taking a cue from the sequel to Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, called Through the Looking-Glass, the re-imagining of this oft-told tale gives Alice adulthood, but that’s its sole new contribution. She’s still naive and sweet, and is only progressive outside of the Underland. Character depth is as surface level as the visuals here, making it really hard to grasp onto anything in the film as an emotional anchor. The Red Queen (Helen Bonham Carter, Fight Club) has now overthrown the White Queen (Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married) and has made Underland into a desolate place ruled in fear, and that fear is the Jabberwock.

Burton’s style is here, as in the duality of real versus dreams in the cold normalcy of the real world and the kooky, wild Underland, yet the film gets rather plain as it goes on, something no fan of Burton would have expected from his version of Alice in Wonderland. Maybe aiding the Plain Jane affair is his use, or over-abundant use of CGI. This is where I wished this film was made during that heyday of his around Beetlejuice. I felt the CG ran rampant, making a question of why didn’t he just make an animated film then, instead of live-action. Curious, no? The CG is fine at times, like with the White Rabbit or the big red head of the Red Queen, but for Tweedledum and Tweedledee or the army, it looked too cartoon-y when it needed to be weirder.

The one great scene is Alice’s appearance at the Mad Tea Party, which is a prime example of what we thought Burton would bring to this adaptation: humor, kookiness, and odd. One cannot finish a Burton review without mentioning Johnny Depp, and his Mad Hatter is a strange creation. Depp is never afraid to take a wild chance, and what failed for his Willy Wonka, sort of works here for Hatter. Sort of. Still, the promised weird and kooky partnership of Lewis Carroll and Tim Burton is a passable event. When it should have been the weirdest thing around, it’s a generic descent into the rabbit hole.

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