Lacks the "muchness" that could have made it great

Rating: 6/10 (9 March 2010)

When Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, I doubt he could have imagined that, over a hundred years after their publication, there would be countless attempts to create a definitive version of his tales in other media, efforts which have ranged from modestly successful to downright awful. Ironically, the strengths of Carroll's novels became the biggest challenges directors have faced when trying to adapt Carroll's work; literary nonsense just doesn't translate well into anything beyond the confines of its own pages, and this fact has more often than not been the doom of most of these attempts at adaptation.
Knowing full well that this is the case, director Tim Burton has taken on the Herculean task of trying to give Carroll's novels a more traditional sense of plot structure and cohesion while at the same time maintaining some semblance of the whimsical spirit of the source material. What has resulted is a version of Alice in Wonderland which isn't an adaptation of Carroll's work, but a re-envisioning, and one that is, like so many versions of Alice before it, only modestly successful at best.
Indeed, under Burton's direction, Alice is no longer a supremely nonsensical story about a bored girl who falls down a rabbit hole and subsequently spends her time wandering in a trippy dimension from bizarre event to bizarre event for no rhyme or reason. It's now a coming of age tale mixed with a bit of female empowerment; not a shock, considering the previous screen writing work of Linda Woolverton (which includes Disney's Mulan and Beauty and the Beast), the scribe of this version of Alice.
Burton's Alice trades Carroll's scatterbrained storytelling for a comparatively straightforward plot in which 19-year-old Alice Kingsley (Mia Wasikowska), a rather unconventional young woman living in Victorian-era England, returns to Underland, a place she once stumbled into when she was six but cannot remember anything about. As it turns out, the inhabitants of Underland have been actively seeking her out for some time in order to fulfill a prophecy in which Alice will save Underland from the tyranny of the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter).
What bothered me most about the story was not the conventionality of the plot, but how uneven and under-developed many of the characters were. Had this version of Alice featured characters which were a little more fleshed out in terms of motives, personality and their relationships with other characters, then I feel the more unimaginative aspects of the plot line could have been more easily forgiven. For example, the story would have had a bit more dramatic punch had the filmmakers spent more time delineating Alice's past relationships with the inhabitants of Underland. It's made perfectly clear that many of these creatures and people are Alice's friends, even if she initially cannot remember who they are, but why? Why should she care so much about being the savior of these bizarre people? The lack of true inter-personality between Alice and the denizens of Underland only serves to undermine the gravitas of the story. Similarly, one of the more interesting side aspects of the movie was the deep-rooted animosity between the Red Queen and the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), which is alluded to briefly at points throughout the movie but never expanded upon enough to give the climax of the movie the weight it should have had.
It seems at times as if Burton was hoping the mere presence and big-screen acumen of cast members such as Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, etc. would make up for the deficiencies of their respective character's scripting. Instead, it only served to allow much of the cast (both live-action and CGI) to drown the movie in scenery-chewing ham, which at times is fun, but does get a bit tiresome after awhile.
Regardless, the film is well-cast, and it is indeed mainly the actors that make this movie watchable. Relative newcomer Mia Wasikowska is probably the best of the live-action characters; she brings a very believable sense of earnestness and determination to Alice. As the swishy Mad Hatter, Johnny Depp is both effectively effervescent and melancholy but seems at times to be channeling Captain Jack Sparrow a little more than he should be. Helena Bonham Carter's Red Queen and Crispin Glover's slimy Knave of Hearts are both pretty one-dimensional but, for what it's worth, are still fun to hate. Anne Hathaway is woefully underused as a head-in-the-clouds White Queen; she has some of the best comedic and dramatic moments of the movie in her limited amount of screen time. The voice cast of the CGI characters is top-notch, with Stephen Fry, Matt Lucas, Michael Sheen, and Alan Rickman the standouts.
Burton's vision of Underland, though not as creative as I'd have liked, is still interesting; unlike the lush, vibrant scenery found in much of Pandora in James Cameron's Avatar, there always seems to be a permeating sense of decay in Underland, as if Underland under the Red Queen is a paradise that is slowly but surely sliding into desolation. The 3-D effects are solid and do make the movie more fun to watch, especially when the Cheshire Cat (my favorite character in the movie overall) is on screen.
The movie has many strengths; it's funny at times, it's well-cast, the characters are enjoyable when they're not being excessively overbearing, and it's apparent that a lot of time and effort was put into the production values of the film. But the strengths just barely outweigh the weaknesses, which are a lack of character development, a stubborn reliance on conventionality and style over substance, and a final climatic battle that is both unexciting and painfully uncreativeÂ…and not to mention ends with one of the stupidest and most pointless moments I've ever seen in a movie.
To paraphrase the Hatter, Burton's Alice in Wonderland is lacking the "much-ness" that could have made it a bit "mucher" that it wound up being.