All style, no substance, little Carroll

Rating: 7/10 (11 March 2010)

I've tried to figure out why this movie doesn't quite work, and I think it must be the script. It can't be story, because Carroll's two Alice books aren't exactly over-burdened with plot: they are like nothing so much as Victorian videogames - Alice enters alien environment and traverses a series of obstacles to be overcome/defeated/avoided until she reaches the final objective, to return home. The books are linear and episodic, and so is this movie.
So if it's not story it must be something else. The Alice books are characterised by their imagination, wit, charm, and originality. Burton's film is imaginative (most of which derives from the books and Tenniel's illustrations), but it isn't very original, neither does it exhibit much wit or charm. Burton does add his own flavour, but that has never been particularly charming.
The story - "Return to Wonderland" - adds so little of its own, and is so heavily dependent on material from the source novels, that one wonders why it was considered necessary to go for a "sequel", and why Burton didn't simply film the book/s.
And this is a shame, because it always looks good (fantastic, in fact, in every sense of the word, although the 3D isn't always effective or in service to the movie), and has some other elements which are worthwhile, chief among which is the performance of Mia Wasikowska as Alice. Depp's Mad Hatter is enjoyable if somewhat out of alignment with Carroll's vision (the occasional channelling of what appears to be Braveheart's William Wallace is interesting, if distracting), and I felt that much of the remaining talent was miscast - or, perhaps, cast to deliberately go against type - Stephen Fry, Alan Rickman and Barbara Windsor, in particular, failed to convince me that they were Carroll's Cheshire Cat, Caterpillar and Dormouse. And this was ironic considering the degree of discussion there was as to whether Alice was the real Alice or not.
Regrettably, there were a number of things which really irritated me, too. Chief among these was the tendency of the script to attribute names - how long has the Caterpillar had a name, for instance? I was irritated by the affectionate diminution of Cheshire Car to "Chess" - "Chesh", surely? And I wish someone had actually read Through The Looking Glass and realised that the critter in question is called the Jabberwock, not Jabberwocky (which is the name of the poem in which it appears), although it was good to see it modelled on Tenniel's illustration. Finally, I was less than thrilled with Helena Bonfire Carter's wholesale lift from Miranda Richardson's Queenie (plagiarism, dearie). You don't have to put the missus in ALL your movies, Tim! Oddly, the bit of the film which I felt worked best was the wholly original framing sequence which lent some depth to Alice's character.
Otherwise, this was a typical Burton example of style over substance.