BEFORE: Like "Robin Hood", there are about a zillion versions of this classic story, even a few more "adult" versions made in the swinging 1970's. It seems like every few years the BBC or some U.S. cable channel rounds up a bunch of out-of-work actors and makes them dress up like the Mock Turtle or the Walrus and Carpenter, and think somehow they're making high art (they're not). Then we've got the more recent video-game versions that think what the story needs is more gore and more goth (it doesn't). But tonight I'm only interested in the Tim Burton version.
This makes FOUR films from 2010 in a neat row! And a bunch of actors carry over from last night's "Harry Potter" film, more on that later.
THE PLOT: 19-year-old Alice returns to the magical world from her childhood adventure, where she reunites with her old friends and learns of her true destiny: to end the Red Queen's reign of terror.
AFTER: I generally enjoy the films of Tim Burton - from "Ed Wood" to "Sleepy Hollow", and "Batman" to "Beetlejuice". I thought "Mars Attacks" got a bad rap, and even "Big Fish" had its merits. But this adaptation of "Alice" I found to be almost complete rubbish.
OK, OK, so it's not a direct adaptation, it's one of those "based on" or "inspired by" deals - but that just gives people free rein to break someone else's toys, doesn't it? Disney (and really, that's who's at fault here, the Disney machine) has been strip-mining all of Western literature in the past few decades, chewing up classic stories like "Tarzan", "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", etc. and then spitting them out for the masses to swallow. Well, thanks, but I'm not that hungry. Then they have the nerve to put their big logo above the title - excuse me, but it's Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland", not Disney's. I hope the ghosts of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Victor Hugo haunt the homes of Disney corporate executives.
Corporate politics aside, the problem with the story here is that in depicting a fantasy realm, where nearly anything can be made to happen, the too-easy trap is to assume that it is a "nonsense" realm, when nothing should be further from the truth. If you put a character (Dorothy, for example) into a fantasy realm (Oz, let's say) and give her a quest (defeat the Wicked Witch) things still need to progress in a logical manner, according to the potentially different, but still very logical, rules of that world.
This film, however, is just a random collection of characters and small ideas thrown together. There's simply no connection between one plot point (and I'm being generous by using that term) and the next. Lewis Carroll's 2nd Alice story, "Through the Looking Glass" was based on a chess game, and what's more logical than that? You can put pieces on a chessboard while reading the book, and plot Alice's progression across the board. When a pawn (Alice) reaches the other side of the board, it even becomes a queen!
And that reminds me of what else is missing here - any sense of gameplay or puzzlecraft. The Wonderland stories are filled with anagrams, acrostics, riddles and rhymes - for the best depiction of this, read the book "The Annotated Alice" by puzzle genius Martin Gardner. Without the riddles and such, the story feels like it has lost its soul.
OK, so they left in one riddle - "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" Unfortunately, it's the one that Lewis Carroll never wrote an answer to. Other people have supplied answers over the years, such as "Edgar Allen Poe wrote on both of them" or "They both have inky quills". But even when Carroll found an answer he liked, which was "Because they both can produce notes, although they are very flat, and they are both NEVAR put with the wrong end in front." He included this answer in a later version of "Alice", but his proofreader corrected "nevar" to "never", and in so doing, killed the punchline.
Beyond that, it's tough to even say what the moral is here. Yes, Alice needs to stick up for herself - what a terrible burden it must be, being the only person in the Victorian era who thinks like a modern feminist woman. But damn it, Alice, if you know you need to take control of your own destiny, then nut up and DO it already. Wasting time imagining a fantasy realm is just that, a waste, unless you're going to write children's books of your own.
But wait - was it a dream, or not? Yes, I admire that you want it to be read both ways, but I think maybe you've got to take a stand on this. And saying that the real name of Wonderland is Underland doesn't really count as a deep insight on the matter. Especially when this is more like "Blunderland". See, that pun, as bad as it was, was more clever than anything in this film, sad to say.
NITPICK POINT: "Jabberwocky" was a poem WITHIN the original "Alice" story. The Jabberwock was not a real character in Wonderland, it was merely a metaphorical allegory or something. But it wasn't walking around interacting with the Dodo and the White Rabbit.
Starring Mia Wasikowska (last seen in "The Kids Are All Right"), Johnny Depp (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides"), Helena Bonham Carter (carrying over from "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1"), Anne Hathaway (last seen in "Valentine's Day"), Crispin Glover (last heard in "Open Season 3"), and the voices of Alan Rickman ("Harry Potter" again), Timothy Spall (ditto), Imelda Staunton (ditto), Michael Sheen, Matt Lucas, Stephen Fry (last seen in "A Civil Action"), Christopher Lee.
RATING: 3 out of 10 flamingoes
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