Here’s the thing: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is not, at all, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Instead of an absurdist, episodic romp through a land full of talking playing cards and inventive literary nonsense, we get a surprisingly conventional fantasy adventure that falls safely in line with current Hollywood fashions: it’s half-sequel, half-“reimagining” that isn’t, sorry to say, that imaginative.
Burton and screenwriter Linda Woolverton’s take on Alice is bizarre, when you think about it: they take a classic known foremost for its lack of narrative coherency, and force a coherent narrative on it. But despite this wrong-headedness, it’s not all bad. In fact, if you accept what they’re delivering, you’re left with a fun and frequently entertaining, if rather minor, adventure tale.
Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is now a 19-year-old woman in Victorian-era England, haunted by dreams of the place she has now forgotten she visited as a girl. While at a party, she’s offered a marriage proposal by a cartoonish twit, and instead of answering, she runs away, follows a white rabbit, and tumbles down the hole again.
The Wonderland — or as its inhabitants call it, Underland — she returns to is a bleak place: the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), her massive head literally in the shape of a heart, now rules the land with an iron fist and a penchant for beheadings. A small band of creatures you might recognize — the rabbit (Michael Sheen), the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), the Blue Caterpillar (Alan Rickman), and Tweedledum & Tweedledee (Matt Lucas) among them — have been waiting for Alice’s return, because it’s been prophesied that she would destroy the Queen’s Jabberwocky and restore the delicate White Queen (Anne Hathaway) to her rightful place as ruler.
Anyone who’s ever read any epic fantasy story is unlikely to be too impressed with that plot, but frankly, for a March blockbuster, it’ll do. Alice in Wonderland has always been about the details anyway, and at least on that count, Burton delivers. The CGI strikes the right balance of imagination and realism (which is to say, you believe Alice is really talking to the disembodied head of a cat), and the production design is inventive; I especially liked the Red Queen’s castle, with heart-shaped arches that manage to look foreboding.
The movie has a welcome streak of female empowerment; Wasikowska successfully sells Alice’s arc from a timid onlooker to a resourceful adventurer to a would-be Jabberwocky slayer; as far as recent female heroes go, she’s a lot more like Coraline than Twilight‘s Bella Swan, thank goodness. (A girl who has dreams that don’t involve wanting to find a hot guy and sacrifice her life to be with him? Amazing!) And the movie also has fun changing her outfit from one extravagant design to the next every fifteen minutes or so.
Kids should enjoy the movie; for those too young to care about following the plot, it will likely provide just the right amount of amazement and fright. Just be prepared for a boring and dialogue-heavy opening ten minutes that, at least in the theater I was in, was hard to hear clearly. I also saw it in 3D, which looked fine, I guess, but my common complaint about the glasses making the screen too dark still stands. Think back to the last 3D movie you saw. Do you ever remember a scene being particularly bright? Everything just looks overcast. But that’s the fault of the technology, not the movie.
I realize I haven’t mentioned Johnny Depp yet. What can I say: as always, he’s reliably good, and if the plot doesn’t allow the Mad Hatter to be quite as mad as I would’ve liked, Depp is instead able to bring some pathos the story and is instrumental in making you care about Wonderland’s current predicament.
The plot is what ultimately what keeps Alice in Wonderland from being great rather than enjoyable-enough entertainment: it’s just enough of a straightjacket that it prevents the movie from going to any truly surprising or delightful places. But the movie’s a professional, slick spectacle with some thrills, some laughs, and a positive message; it’ll do. Until the next big movie comes out.
