Alternative Title: "Alice in what she always called Wonderland but is actually called Underland but the title says Wonderland because it's marketing gold"

Rating: 4/10 (5 March 2010)

"Alice in Wonderland". Surely everyone knows what it is. The story of a girl who goes into the strangest and most surreal visions for a Children's story. Whilst it's intentionally said to be a "nonsense" story (you don't get genres like that anymore, do you?), it's considered a classic. Thus, many adaptations have been made and the story and it's characters and sheer scale of surreality is more influential today in the late 2000's-early 2010's than it's ever been.
So, how's does getting one of the great artistic film visionaries of the late 20th Century, early 21st to resurrect and re-imagine the story for a new generation on an epic, big-budget scale with a high-calibre cast sound? Sounds like a pretty sweet investment. After all, this is Tim Burton we're talking about, the creator of "Edward Scissorhands", "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and "Big Fish" to name a few (of the best he's done at least). So now it's finally out, and did he succeed to really breathe new life into this highly-influential world and make it enjoyable to all? Yes and...not really.
I could talk about this movie a lot and point out every single little detail on what I thought of the movie, but I'll try and summarise without spoilers as best as I can. Positives first: The overall artistic design, character design, special effects and overall direction of the movie were for the most part, excellent. Tim Burton certainly has a penchant for bringing his visions and bizarre artistic interpretations of things right to the screen and it's usually an awe to see and it's definitely the case with this movie also. And the beginning and ending period-esquire "real-life" scenes are surprisingly well done too, never thought Burton can go period and get it done really well! Casting, on the most part, is really fantastic too. People would be pessimistic over Johnny Depp being the Mad Hatter, but he pulls off a good performance anyway. Not Depp's best, but certainly not his worst. The best casting in the whole movie however was without a doubt Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen. My god, what an incredibly fun portrayal of the character she's brought to the screen and bar none one of the best villain characters of the past year thanks to Carter's performance. Anne Hathaway was also shockingly good as the White Queen, with an ultra-impressive British accent and a delicate, mysterious performance combining Nigella Lawson with a pure Disney Princess character, in a good way. Which brings me to my next positive, the existing characters are portrayed mostly to justice and sometimes even beyond that and whilst not all of the additional characters are particularly stand-out, those that are good are certainly great additions.
Now, the negatives: The story is a weird experience to get used to, not the good kind of weird neither. Not all of the story is bad, there are a lot of good scenes and some new additions and features are enjoyable too, but some of these shifts from the original story's narrative causes the story for some who already know the story to feel really, really slow in places. Unnecessary for a place like Wonderland which is originally brimming with whimsy and gleeful weirdness. Oh I'm sorry, "Underland" apparently. And whilst I did say that most of the character were very good, original or not, there are also some that are frighteningly generic. I could go on about these types of characters but I'm probably almost at 1,000 words already so I'll just say that one really frighteningly generic character shouldn't of been so prominent in the story, yet he is in the first quarter of the movie.
Alright, so in summary: Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" is worth going to see, if you can get through the movie's much slower moments and the differences in story to the original, granted if the original really did have much of a plot anyway.
6.5/10