Secondhand Reviews: "Alice In Wonderland"

Rated PG for fantasy violence... though, personally, I would have given it a PG-13. I definitely think it stretches the boundaries of the straight PG.

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 If ever there was a director who seemed born to make a particular movie, it would have seemed that Tim Burton and "Alice In Wonderland" would have been the idea dream combination. Burton has been making movies for decades now that echo Lewis Carroll's twisted visions and eccentric characters, and in particular his surreal sense of humor. Now we've finally got Burton making the movie he was apparently born to make and, guess what? It's more like a movie a more conventional director was born to make.

This "Alice In Wonderland" is really more of a sequel, although it does hit all the familiar notes and feature all the well-known characters. At age 19, 13 years after her first trip to Wonderland, Alice has been convinced it was all a dream and is now facing a boring, unwanted marriage which she runs away from to chase a familiar looking rabbit and fall down a familiar hole back into Wonderland. But it's a Wonderland much changed... dull, grey, and dominated by the evil Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), who has only to take over the land ruled by her sister the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) to rule the entire land. Alice, in tandem with the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), has to find the Vorpal Sword and use it to slay the Red Queen's champion, the Jabberwocky, in order to save the land and make it once again the brightly-colored paradise she knew.

Sound like a rather different tale than Lewis Carroll told? That's for sure! Burton has taken a sophisticated, mature and biting satire of human behavior and turned it into an action-adventure story with plenty of computer-generated effects and big battle scenes. I'm just glad that I saw the 2-D version (the second run theatres never show 3-D, you know) so that I didn't have to put up with that, too (and after all, this picture wasn't SHOT in 3-D, anyhow... the 3-D effects were added after the fact). It's rather ironic that I saw this the very next day after "Iron Man 2", which had many of the same problems, but also had enough in the way of great performances to save it. This movie wasn't so lucky.

Now, it isn't that it's a total failure. The early segments set in Alice's painfully restricted Victorian world work surprisingly well and actually made me wish that Burton would make a whole movie set in that environment some day... I'll bet it would be fascinating. And once Alice gets to Wonderland (which the inhabitants actually call "Underland"... she's remembered it wrong), her initial meetings with all the familiar characters are a beauty to behold... Burton has just the right magic touch with favorites like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum (both Timothy Spall), The Chesire Cat and the blue caterpillar. The fact is, if he had continued on with the same kind of Carroll-inspired tale this movie is at first, I'm sure that Burton WOULD HAVE proved that he was the only contemporary director who could do this story right. But then he had to go all Hollywood on us.

The notion of Alice returning to "Underland" at 19 is not a bad one by any means... it has a lot of potential as far as commenting on how we change as we grow up and how much of the child is still in us. But Burton totally abandons that premise and goes for the big action scenes. This is a gentle, surreal world that was simply not ever meant to have colossal battles with armies of good and evil, or an armor-clad heroine taking on a monster (the Jabberwocky) with a sword. But those are the kinds of movies that sell the big tickets these days, so that's the kind that Tim Burton has made, instead of something that really reflects his own unique ideas and inspirations.

And what about the kinds of things that rescued "Iron Man 2"? Like great performances? Well, Johnny Depp is a delight as the Mad Hatter, no question about it... but at the same time, there are definite echoes of other characters he's played over the years. Crispin Glover, one of the most colorful and eccentric actors in Hollywood, actually is bland and colorless as a henchman of the Red Queen. Newcomer Mia Wasikowski as Alice plays the character as if the last 13 years never happened and she's a 6-year-old trapped in a 19-year-old's body. The one really outstanding performance is Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen, with her head several times the size of her computer-generated body and insisting that every member of her court MUST have some outsized body part (nose, ears, whatever). She gets totally into the right spirit of the story (the original story, not Burton's) and gives us a character who's not only evil but sympathetic, wanting to connect with others but not able to. She's certainly more interesting than her completely personality-free sister, played by a clearly unenthused Anne Hathaway.

Effects? Perfect, everything you could possibly want? Music? Danny Elfman, Burton's regular composer for most of his career, does another sterling job in creating a musical score that perfectly compliments Burton's bizarre world without dominating the action and telling the audience what to think.But these are all window dressing, ultimately. The man who should have given us the ultimate "Alice" of all time has instead been persuaded to do a "work for hire" movie and tell a story that takes the trappings of the Lewis Carrol classic and uses them in the service of a story that almost any director could have made. I can only hope that he realizes his mistake and returns to more heartfelt material soon. Tim Burton is too unique and valuable a talent for him to stop being Tim Burton. After all, nobody else is going to take his place if he does.