A film featuring Johnny Depp and a story full of surreal imagery should have been a home run for Tim Burton. This is the man who made Edward Scissorhands, Big Fish, Sweeney Todd and even Batman. It’s a wonder how someone as visually impressive and original as Burton could deliver something so utterly generic. On paper Alice in Wonderland sounds like gangbusters, but instead it’s a hollow and meandering run-of-the-mill adventure film.
This film embodies everything Burton is parodied and criticized for: using the same imagery over and over again, repetitive storytelling and just being quirky for the sake of it. As a disclaimer, I am nothing short of a Burton supporter. Burton has delivered a string of films that not only carry a sense of nostalgia for me, but I unabashedly love his work. This will go down as a black mark on his mostly excellent filmography. This isn’t even on par with his watchable B-movies: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Sleepy Hollow. Thankfully, it isn’t as bad as Planet of the Apes, but similar to that film, Alice doesn’t carry his stamp of fresh creativity and feels like a rehash of old tricks.
This isn’t a remake or a reboot, it’s honestly more of a sequel. Alice is now nineteen-years old living in England. She believes in the impossible and feels like an outcast. She dislikes the high class society, which is understandable, since they’re all shown as prudes. Now, she’s going to be proposed to by one of those prudes. During this moment of hesitation she runs off to chase after a bunny rabbit who seems to be trying to lure her to a portal. This portal will take her to Wonderland aka Underland (as it’s referred to as). On her arrival she has no recollection of the last time she was there. She believes it was all a dream – she repeats this multiple times to let the audience know. While in this magical world she runs into old pals she can’t even remember: the eccentric Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), White Rabbit (Michael Sheen), the lovable Tweedledee and Tweedledum (Matt Lucas) and an array of other oddball characters.
Soon she learns of the prophecy that she will be the one to help take down the evil Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and will defeat the Jabberwocky. The Jabberwocky is a fierce dragon that works under the Red Queen. It’s described as if it’s an unstoppable beast [Spoiler Alert] and despite this fact, Alice seems to defeat it in only a matter of minutes. It’s not the epic battle that it’s described as and, like most of the action scenes, it’s lackluster at best. [Spoiler Over]
The best way to describe the story, aside from comparing it to The Chronicles of Narniaor plenty of other “hero’s journey” films, is as a video game. A very, very expensive video game. Alice is thrown into a series of episodic encounters and situations all rendered meandering and choppy. This isn’t a story, but just a batch of repetitive set pieces tied together. It never flows naturally and the pacing feels tiresome. Going back to the video game comparison, the film even leads up to a big boss-esque battle aka when Alice fights the Jabberwocky. The whole climax is incomprehensible and underwhelming. Similar to the ending of Planet of the Apes, one can’t follow the action. It’s anti-climatic and feels like it’s there simply for the sake of having more action.
While this is the Alice show, and Mia Wasikowska is fairly good, there’s also the Mad Hatter. Considering it’s Depp, the Hatter’s role is expanded and he has nearly as much screen time as Alice. This is a bad thing considering Depp’s performance is more so in line with his work in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory than his other great works. It’s hilarious how the Mad Hatter has been turned into a freedom fighter and not someone who’s simply mad. Yes, he’s crazy, and he even has an unneeded origin flashback scene, but why turn the Mad Hatter into a warrior in the last twenty minutes? It’s just another addition to the already high count of baffling choices made. Depp is a great actor, but here he overdoes it. The only characters you care for are all footnotes. Cheshire Cat, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and even a Hookah smoking caterpillar are far more interesting than both Alice and the Mad “freedom fighting” Hatter.
If there’s something Burton must be given credit it for, it’s his seamless mix of live action and CG. He’s created a fully realized and, mostly, detailed world. Alice’s interactions with this CG rendered environment is by all accounts believable. There’s definitely some beauty to be found here but it all, in the end, gets lost in this mess. The addition of 3D in post-production does very little to enhance the film. It doesn’t add subtle details to the world the way Coraline and Avatar did, it’s just flat and dull. This can be attributed to the fact Burton didn’t shoot this in 3D or because this is his first outing with in the third dimension. One aspect that must be mentioned: Crispin Glover’s Knave of Hearts. Glover isn’t bad, but for some odd reason Burton decided to make his body completely CG. He’s obviously going for the Jack the Skellington (The Nightmare Before Christmas) look with gangly legs and arms, but it instead results in an off-putting level of awkwardness, like the rest of the film.
It’s still puzzling how Alice in Wonderland turned out the way it did. This should have been something compellingly strange in typical Burton fashion, but it’s just a generic adventure film that’s been seen before. While this isn’t a disaster, it’s a failure on multiple levels. It’s one of Burton’s few and tragic misfires.