The wrong Alice

Rating: 1/10 (5 June 2010)

Some five years ago I naively thought that no movie director, not even in Hollywood, could treat English classics worse than Peter Jackson. Now, after Guy Ritchie's "Sherlock Holmes" and Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" I know that I was wrong. At least in the LotR movie you could somewhat recognize the original book - even if it was infinitely dumbed down to the level of the general populace.
Tim Burton has proved to be much more audacious. He did exactly what Mr. Jackson didn't dare to do. He took a literary masterpiece, universally known and universally loved, amputated all its stylistic foundations, and brutally hammered what was left into a horrible mess of so-so CGI and typical Disney storyline.
Do I need to repeat that Lewis Carroll's Wonderland was anything but dark and depressive? The book was based on pure nonsense, and its world indeed felt like a vivid dream, strange but never frightening. Carroll's humor was light-hearted, friendly and never offensive. The characters were silly and never scary. In the movie everything is the other way round. The girl is almost a woman, the dream has become a nightmare and Wonderland is now Underland - a cold, ugly and repulsive place where you certainly wouldn't want to go.
The story is hardly based on Carroll's books at all. Alice in plate armor wielding a sword and fighting a dragon? What the hell? No, wait - seriously... what the hell? The characters, too, had to suffer greatly - in all senses. Half of them are ripped from the Looking-glass world (which is supposed to be a different world because it's from another dream). The ever-sleepy Dormouse is replaced with an ever-vigorous mouse (or is it a hamster?) for no apparent reason. Why is everyone given some stupid name? Where's the Duchess? Where's Bill the Lizard, the Gryphon, the Mock Turtle, the Duck, the Lory? Have all of them been beheaded at the order of the Burton's bloodthirsty Red Queen? By the way, if there's no Duchess, why is the White Rabbit in a hurry? Why a half of Underland inhabitants are plain humans - what are they doing in a magical world?
Acting? There isn't much of it actually. Wooden faces, two-dimensional personalities, boring remarks. Only villains (Helena Bonham Carter/the Red Queen and Crispin Glover/the Knave of Hearts) feel more or less alive but ultimately they are just as boring and repetitive as everyone else. Even Johnny Depp's performance as the Mad Hatter is hardly a redeeming quality. Depp is a very good actor but he's not a magician. He's restrained by this incredibly poor script too and his character has to do things that the Mad Hatter (remember, in the book he was an unpleasant and cowardly fellow) just wouldn't be able to do.
I admire the book. I've read it maybe a dozen times and I really want to find something good to say about this movie. Alas, I can't.
0/10