Alice in Wonderland - Movie Review

By Anne Brodie Mar 5, 2010, 12:09 GMT

From Walt Disney Pictures and visionary director Tim Burton comes an epic 3D fantasy adventure ALICE IN WONDERLAND, a magical and imaginative twist on some of the most beloved stories of all time.  JOHNNY DEPP stars as the Mad Hatter and MIA WASIKOWSKA as 19-year-old Alice, who returns to the whimsical world she first encountered as a young girl, reuniting with her childhood friends:  the White Rabbit, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, ...more

This is not your great grandmother’s Alice in Wonderland.  Tim Burton has dispensed with Lewis Carroll’s pretty storybook world for once and for all.  The charmingly old fashioned has been replaced by state-of-the-art edgy for better or worse.  The classic line drawings give way to CGI, with requisite videogame elements for audiences raised on them. 

The computer artistry is spectacular but it’s not necessarily convincing or dimensional, intimate, and soulful.  The inevitably flat, hard edges, the always eerie result of computer generated perfection, wows but ultimately disappoints.  Computer art always falls just short of beauty.  Its eye popping for sure but lacks meat.

The biggest surprise for the new Alice is that Burton has toned down the psychedelic aspects of the famously druggy story for a kind of wonky surrealism.  It is certainly a visual parade of delights sprung from Tim Burton’s weird imagination.

Alice makes a return trip down the Rabbit Hole, conveniently just as a sneering young man proposes marriage.  She back in Wonderland /Underland sipping the potions she needs to get in and out of places, reuniting with the people she met there ten years earlier.  It seems to be a less ideal place than she remembers.  The skies are perpetually cloudy and threatening.  War is always around the corner, the Red Queens’ savagery knows no bounds and life in monstrous.  BTW, the Rabbit Hole looks like images of a particularly brutal colonoscopy. 

John Depp is characteristically quixotic in the kind of role he seems born to play.  Flaming red hair and brows, an exaggerated overbite, pink lipstick and plaid lace gloves are perfectly enchanting and weird.  He’s manically energetic, which, coming from a super ‘cool’ superstar, is just double the fun.  The only quibble is that his accent gets stronger as the film progresses, although that porridge-thick Scottish brogue is a showstopper.

Helena Bonham Carter couldn’t be more storybook evil.  Her beauty is tossed on the trash heap, replaced by hilariously icy hauteur and a wicked sense of ironic fun.  Evil Queens are evil for a reason, and hers is an unfortunately bulbous head.  She has reason to feel short-changed.

Ann Hathaway’s her estranged sister, The White Queen.  She’s good, patient, funny and yet exceedingly eerie, the iconic storybook queen with prettily raised elbows and fluttering hands making her seem lighter than air, the stuff of dreams, not bound to the savage ground of Wonderland.  Hard to carry off, but Hathaway enters some kind of ghost world to do the job. 

Matt Lucas as Tweedledee and Tweedledum is inspired and I particularly enjoyed Alan Rickman’s sexy, dramatic Absalom the Blue Caterpillar.  Best news of all, Crispin Glover’s back!  He’s the Knave of Hearts, the Red Queen’s evil stooge, all eleven feet of him, a tall, dark, brutally handsome reverse of the fairytale hero.

108 minutes of 3D can be taxing to the eyes and head.  It’s a good idea to take the glasses off from time to time.

Written by Linda Woolverton, based on Lewis Carroll’s books
Directed by Tim Burton
Opens March 5
Runtime: 108 minutes
MPAA: Rated PG for fantasy action/violence involving scary images and situations, and for a smoking caterpillar
Country: USA
Language: English