CINEMA: Alice in Wonderland

Reimagining? Remake? Tim Burton’s interpretation of Lewis Carroll’s classic story is none of these. Think of it as a subtle sequel mixing loving homage with out-and-out weird.

Though it borrows liberally from its literary namesake, Burton has taken enough liberty with the source material to ensure it’s got his own idiosyncratic stamp all over it.

Set approximately 12 years after her foray into ‘Underland’, Alice Kingsley finds herself on the cusp of marrying into high society, betrothed to the repulsive Lord Ascot whose marriage proposal she is due to accept. Already wrestling intensely with the matter of her impending future, she follows the White Rabbit into a thoughtfully placed garden maze and finds herself tumbling down a familiar hole to find herself in a land she can only remember in her dreams.

But this isn’t the Wonderland she, or the audience for that matter, remember. Saturated in a charcoal grey wash, Burton’s Wonderland is leaden with sombre tones, with colour screaming to be released from every pore. As Alice makes her way across this foreign world, familiar hues can be spied spattered across the landscape but very rarely are they allowed to pop and provide the fizz that a story like this demands. The lure of a stereoscopic escapade also disappoints, there’s nothing here that demands the film is seen with the kind of glasses that bring back memories of a thousand fashion horror stories.

At first, it’s an amusing distraction but then it simply fades into the background, coming and going on a whim, the overall consequence being that there’s nothing to really recommend choosing one experience over the other, unlike, say, Avatar. As the first major 3D film to come after it, comparisons are inevitable and perhaps more than a little unfair given the long gestation period of the latter.

Since Alice has neatly forgotten all about Wonderland, Burton makes the first half of the movie a Lewis Carroll Greatest Hits package. It’s not quite frustrating enough to be an origin story but characters are often prone to lapsing into enigmatic exposition (everyone’s mad here, you see). Alice, played by Mia Wasikowska, is a distant creature, outwardly brittle powered by the sheer force of will instilled in her by her deceased father.

It’s an unforgiving learning curve, you may find yourself wondering early on why you should cheer for her. It’s the supporting cast that carries the rest of the movie – Helena Bonham Carter’s deeply funny Red Queen (who finds the time to grapple poignantly with the existential question of whether it is better to be loved or feared) is the undoubted stand-out, while Anna Hathaway plays her sister, the White Queen, as an alluring curiosity, a delicate slice of punk-goth fragility meets borderline psychosis.

Both are complimented by an ensemble populated by some of Britain’s finest in disguise – that’s Michael Sheen as the White Rabbit, Barbara Windsor as the Dormouse and Matt Lucas as Tweedledum and Tweedledee (stay with with me, both Windsor and Lucas do fine) Stephen Fry also makes a turn as a pitch-perfect Cheshire Cat who frequently threatens to be the best thing in the film, so much so you’re acutely aware just how little screen time he has.

Elsewhere, there are still enough misses to bring balance to the film. Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter, patently written as the big signature role, is nothing more than a poorly drawn cartoon and Crispin Glover’s Knave of Hearts is an unsettling mix of poor CG and creepy man-slave. Some of the characters are so poorly rendered, that putting the blame on the stylistic look of the film is simply short-sighted.

Nonetheless, there are enough distractions from the threadbare plot: Alice appears, is told her destiny is to slay the Jabberwocky, the Red Queen’s pet dragon and part-time enforcer, and then ambles slowly through a series of short skits towards the inevitable confrontation with said dragon, culminating in a third act that seems to forget we really came to see Alice, in Wonderland. Not Alice, in a suit of armour, holding an improbably named sword. Fighting monsters.

The biggest criticism of the film is that while ultimately beautiful, it still manages to feel like someone’s $150 million sketchbook. Although a lot of the design work is impressive, there’s the pervading feeling that if only someone would go back and ink the lines and develop the characters a little more, the film would feel altogether more like a creatively nourished whole.

As it is, there’s nothing here that screams ‘Watch Me’, it amounts to little more than an amusing diversion wrapped up in pretty packaging. As such, you may find your appetite for another adventure in Wonderland shrinking faster than Alice after cake.