I finally got around to seeing Alice in Wonderland . I had waited until my fiancée was able to see it with me, aren’t I sweet? I saw it in 2D because 3D is dumb. Hopefully the rest of the world will feel the same soon and we can phase it out of our lives, sadly I know this won’t happen.
In the 2D theater there was almost no one there. A few stragglers showed up once the previews began. My fiancée, a friend and I were all excited. My fiancée and friend because they of course had read the books and watched the classic Disney film. I, as you can guess, have never read the books. (Begin collective sigh over my sad childhood. Why didn’t my mother love me and read Alice’s tales to me? Probably because she didn’t love me.)
Going into the film, my only knowledge of the story is from watching Disney and the few Alice references I’ve heard throughout life. I did know there were two books: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There. And according to Wikipedia there have been at least 25 film and TV adaptations of the book including one musical porno. (And because I’m very dedicated to my blog, I’m searching for clips from this film. For research only of course.)
This version of Alice in Wonderland, directed by Tim Burton, is a mishmash of the two books with a lot of Burton and screenwriter Linda Woolverton additions. Not having read the book, I wasn’t as appalled by this as everyone else. The film has a bizarre tone, a tone common in Burton’s work. It’s the feeling that, although based on a children’s book, marketed at children, and paid for by Disney, the film could at any point take an unforeseen turn and everyone could be brutally murdered by anyone. Alice might sprout machine gun hands and annihilate everyone in Underland. Fortunately that doesn’t happen, but the creepy feeling does follow the viewer throughout the film.
The story in Burton’s film takes place 13 years after Alice’s first visit to Underland, which she so mistakenly called Wonderland when she was a child. It does open with Alice as a young girl. She’s bizarre and has dark circles around her eyes. She looks as if she’s dead. Jump forward 13 years and Alice is all grown up. She is pale, lanky and a snotty teen. She’s being pushed by her mother to be a proper lady but Alice wants none of it. Through a series of events she finds herself once again tumbling down the rabbit’s hole and into Underland.
Thinking back, I can’t honestly give you an exact reason why this movie wasn’t good. It had everything you would expect from a film like this: action, special effects, fire, silly characters, jokes, and a dragon. (Actually, that doesn’t sound good.) But it had everything children would enjoy but I refer once again to the tone of the movie. Alice, played by Mia Wasikowska, mopes throughout the film. Her lack of energy is a drain on the entire film. I don’t know if Mia is unable to be animated or if Burton said, “Hey, play this scene like you’re asleep. Be a zombie that doesn’t want to eat human flesh. Bore us.” I feel like that is how it must have been on set.
The special effects were of course special. I don’t think they were great however. I think these effects were the kind of effects that fail at hiding the fact that they are effects. They failed to blend into the story. The movie looked like nothing more than a very expensive video game. The effects yanked me out of the story at every turn.
Alice meets a series of familiar faces. The Cheshire Cat, the Tweedles, the White Rabbit and of course Johnny Depp. I mean The Mad Hatter. I love Johnny Depp. I believe he is one of the best actors of his generation. However, Depp hasn’t had a good performance since 2004′s Finding Neverland . Some of you may argue that he was great in all of the Pirates of Caribbean films and I wouldn’t disagree. However, unless he brings something new to the character in each film, it doesn’t really count as a great performance. He is obviously the only thing worth watching in the Pirates trilogy but by far not a fine performance every time. I also respect his loyalty to Burton, but just because Burton asks him to do something doesn’t mean he should say yes. If he’s not careful Burton will take him down with him. (A great example of the potential for this to happen is one scene near the end of the film. When you see this scene you will think: What the hell just happened?)
Let’s be honest, when was the last time Tim Burton directed a good movie? Big Fish wasn’t bad, that was 2003, but really the last time he made a good movie was in 1994 with Ed Wood . That’s a long time ago. Going into Alice I trusted that Burton would be able to pull it off but he didn’t. So I wondered why I thought Tim Burton was so great. Looking back at his career, I think he’s been riding the brilliance of his early work for too long.
Bottom line: Kids might like it or it might give them nightmares because on some unconscious level they know there’s something not quite right about it. Adults will be bored and hate themselves for ever having children that like movies like Alice in Wonderland.
