Looks good but ultimately disappointing

Rating: 5/10 (21 March 2010)

What's sad about Tim Burton's 'Alice In Wonderland' is that there is nothing new or original about it. Apparently Burton felt 'no connection' to the original stories and was uninterested in filming a new take on them. What we have then, are Carrol's characters uprooted and re-written into a new story by Linda Woolverton but its a story that has been done many, many times before and is therefore utterly predictable and bland. It seems that Hollywood must have a formula now for fantasy epic-type films and this new 'Alice' duly ticks all the boxes.
So, we find Alice on a quest involving a (fairly weak) moral dilemma, all the characters and places have to have fussy Tolkeinesque names (including an evil sounding double-barrelled place name for the Red Queen's realm), most of same characters are now irredeemably cute to fit in with modern pre-conceptions (sword-wielding dormouse a-la Narnia, doe-eyed heroic CGI dog a-la all the other doe-eyed heroic CGI dogs in recent CGI movies) and (of course) a giant climactic battle between good and evil! Its all a bit disappointing.
The story is pretty uninvolving. There's an attempt to make us 'feel' for Alice's friends (and when were these creatures ever her friends anyway? None of them are especially friendly in the books) but as none of them have any real substance, its virtually impossible to feel for them. The Mad Hatter has an important role (of course he has - he's Johnny Depp) and I suspect that we are supposed to 'feel' for him but pathos and the Hatter don't really go together and he ends up being just rather creepy. Alice goes on a couple of times about 'needing the help' of her 'friend' the Blue Caterpillar but in the event, he doesn't contribute very much. There is much talk about how Alice is changing as the story goes on but she's actually pretty much the same at the end as she was at the start - did we ever believe she was going to marry the foppish redhead? I am forty three and have no children so I'm not best placed to say whether it succeeds as a children's film but there were quite a lot of children in the audience at the screening I attended and scarcely a chuckle from any of them. In my opinion, this is where the film fails the source material - it has very little charm and very little humour; it is ALL about the visuals which brings me to...
PLUS POINTS - It looks fantastic! Most of the creatures look good. I particularly liked the Cheshire Cat (steals the film) and frog and fish footmen. Apart from the initial garden scene, the landscape of Underland is a little dull and uninspiring. The White Queen's realm is pretty but in a rather forced, Rivendell kind of way whilst the evil Red Queen goes for a more 'Dead Marshes-faces-in-the-water' kind of look BUT it is all well rendered and very impressive. Some of the acting is very good - Helena Bonham-Carter was the only one who made me laugh a couple of times, Ann Hathaway seems to want to play the evil one and hints at it throughout her otherwise Glinda-like performance and Depp is impressive if not ultimately successful (hated the intermittent Scottish accent - were we referencing Braveheart?). A few scenes worked for me - most involving the Red Queen and the start of the tea party scene which threatened to be almost conventional, and therefore genuinely amusing and charming, Alice! Otherwise, it was all a bit of a mess. The formulaic fantasy-epic film has been done much better elsewhere if that's what you're looking for and if you're looking for a good film of 'Alice In Wonderland', there's a decent one kicking about somewhere with Miranda Richardson as the Queen of Hearts and Martin Short as a genuinely batty Hatter!