bizarre (and not-so bizarre) eye candy, an ideal cast, uneven results

Rating: 4/10 (13 March 2010)

Tim Burton should be ideal to direct an adaptation of Lewis Carroll's stories set Through the Looking Glass. And, as it turns out, he is. But this is not a real 'Alice' story like we've seen before. It feels more like a Wonderland story by committee, the sequel, where Alice returns at the age of twenty, has some disassociation from her first time down the rabbit hole, and is told 'it is written' or whatever that she has to face the Jabberwocky, and slay it. It's not that the story is entirely bad, but the way that the screenwriter Linda Woolverton puts it, nothing is really fresh the way one might hope for. The designs go some way to change things up, mostly on the human characters, and it usually looks pretty and bright and dark and ominous and surreal. Which is just right. But the story needed work, an injection of the 'less-business-as-usual' juice.
It's hard to exactly pinpoint, but I can give some guesses. For one thing, Burton's film is in large part set in a CGI landscape. One misses the days when Burton would film on breathtaking sets like in Batman or Edward Scissorhands. I'm reminded of the criticism of the Star Wars prequels, which I have made from time to time, that the computer effects drown out the potential human elements or things of interest in the story. I might be able to cut some more slack to the film if it weren't so beholden to the HUGE CGI effects (one wonders if Wonderland all took place behind blue-screen, certain actors included). It's hard to ignore, however, how rigid everything seems, from the attack from that big dog-like creature with the missing eye, to the Jabberwocky itself, barely saved by an all-too-brief voice appearance from Christopher Lee.
This shouldn't be entirely to Burton's discredit, however. Here, like on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, one sees Burton still has some skills brought over from his days as an animator from Disney. Something is just missing after a while, though, a general focus of the effects assisting the story, of which the story is already kind of generic (some have compared to Narnia, though I saw more Lord of the Rings). After a while it's like Burton seems to be more interested in the little things, the garnishes that he lays about in his auteur fashion, leaving the big effects and "sets" to his crew. One of these garnishes is Helena Bonham Carter, wife and sort-of muse for his past several films. She just keeps getting better in his work, following Sweeney Todd, and here as the Red Queen she's reason enough to at least sneak in to see her scenes, as her giant head on a small body is ferocious and subtle and beet-red screaming. It's hilarious and intense a performance you'll see this week.
Others who pop on screen are more or less lucky based on their skills. Of course Johnny Depp- playing a Mad Hatter who obviously gets more screen-time because of the star status of Depp, or just how much Burton loves looking at him- can play crazy well, as he does here, but it also gets a little boring after a while, punctuated by an out-of-left-field moment (yes, an out-of-left-field moment in an Alice movie) when he breakdances at the end, which has been alluded to but not as WTF as that! Alan Rickman, Crispin Glover, and Stephen Rea round out the cast as other notables, though their screen time is all too brief, left to their own devices they can only do so much as a caterpillar, one-eyed Red-Queen lackey, and Cheshire Cat respectively. They're just overwhelmed, ultimately, by the special effects.
So why the high rating with these problems, not to mention a less than stellar girl playing Alice (Mia Wasikowska is a pretty face, but can't do much with such a thin character)? Because as a Tim Burton movie, flaws and all, it's still amazing to look at and sometimes just too weird to put off as a total mess. It's definitely more in league with something like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory than with Burton's best or his worst: it's an intense curio, made as a 'family film' but with such dark corners and outrageous beats that will throw off even the most hardcore surrealist. It's a flight of fancy that owes as much to its hit-or-miss Disney studio name than its iconoclast director.