Movie Review: Alice in Wonderland
Posted in Movie Reviews on March 10th, 2010Well, regretfully, I have to say this was the worst Tim Burton movie I’ve ever seen. To begin with, instead of just relying on source material from the two books, Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Burton decided to go with a linear narrative. Now, it’s very rare that you’re going to hear me encouraging deviating from a linear narrative, as you take a good deal of risk when you do, but this is one of the rare occasions that I would actually endorse it. Part of the magic of the two books is that there isn’t really any cohesive plot to speak of. There’s a feeling of unreality; Alice is having adventures in a kind of dream world, so the only needed transitions are her running from encounter to encounter with the different animals and creatures. It worked in the books, and it would have worked here, but strangely, Burton decided to just take the characters and write his own story with them, combined with some back story and mythology that is only hinted at. The results are disastrous.
For a guy like Burton, who I’d commend as being one of the most creative directors I’ve ever encountered, Alice is surprisingly derivative. There were aspects that reminded me of several other films, among them the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Narnia movies (and books), along with some stripes of Neverending Story. The battle scene between Alice and the Jabberwock at the end reminded me very much of the claymation characters from Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, one of the worst movies ever made, right up there with the live action Bewitched and Gigli. Awful. But the movie that Alice most resembles for me is actually one that might possibly be considered the biggest misstep for another great director, Stephen Spielberg. I’m referring to Hook. The similarities are many. Alice, like Peter, returns to a land of enchantment she’d known as a child, but as an adult. She finds that in her absence there have been unpleasant changes happening, and only by embracing the childlike quality that had allowed her to visit the “imaginary” locale in the first place- Wonderland, or Neverland respectively- can she set things right again. Hook would have been redeemable had Spielberg just stuck to the book and not tried to rewrite a classic. Burton is guilty of the same crime.
There’s the additional problem of all of the characters seemingly going for different tones. Some of them seem to be there for comedic effect, some to ramp up the action, some are going for melodrama. It’s like Burton just told everyone to let their freak flag fly and do what they feel. The result is that there’s a real incongruence. If it was going to be straightforward action, then they should have stuck to that, the same for comedy. Since Burton couldn’t seem to make up his mind, we as an audience can’t either, and that’s never good. Then there are so many other, smaller things to potentially nitpick. Johnny Depp, as the Mad Hatter, is inexplicably Scottish; he goes into battle at the end of the movie in a kilt, yielding a claymore. Huh?! During the movie he laments that since darkness has fallen over Wonderland, (which the natives refer to as Underland, also inexplicably), there is a certain dance he no longer does. When the White Queen and her disciples win the battle at the end, he breaks into the dance, which looks like a juiced-up version of the Electric Slide. I read in a newspaper where the reviewer compared it to the Ewoks dancing at the end of Return of the Jedi, and I concur. It’s the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever seen Johnny Depp do on the big screen, again, simply awful. The Jabberwock talks, speaking not to Alice, but to the Vorpal Sword, with whom it apparently has some sort of shared history; since Burton just pulled this particular piece of clap-trap out of his ass and there’s no mention of it in the books, this is merely confusing. The same goes for an invented character, a bloodhound who is being forced to track Alice against his will because the Red Queen is holding his mate and puppies captive. Hey, Wonderland is pretty great, but you know what it needs? A C.G.I. bloodhound! Think how much that will add to the movie!
I could go on, but I think you get the picture. The best I can say for this super-expensive disaster is that there are some pretty colors from time to time, but they don’t come close to saving this lifeless outing. I saw this movie in 2D, rather than pay the extra four dollars a ticket, and now I’m glad that I did. 2D, 3D, or 5D, nothing was going to save this movie; it was dead on arrival. I’ll just say this in closing. I don’t know how many of the choices I’ve been talking about, the decision to deviate from the source material, the addition of new characters, the baffling creation of a new mythology that is then inadequately explained, the making of the movie into a Lord of the Rings style quest that pits all the characters against each other on opposite sides of a central conflict, etc…I don’t know how many of those choices were Burton’s, or how many were the Disney execs telling him what to do to try to make it more appealing to the masses. For Burton’s sake, I really hope he was being leaned on heavily, because if he had creative control and he did something like this, I’ve lost a lot of respect for the man. Everybody misfires every once in a while, creatively, and even a guy like Burton is allowed to do it. But if he was going to choose one time for a major misfire, he might have done so with another project besides one based on two of the most beloved children’s books of all time. On paper, it seemed like Alice was the movie that Burton was born to direct. I don’t know. Maybe the pressure got to him. My rating: 3/10.