why are there so many eyes being stabbed in this film?

Rating: 1/10 (14 March 2010)

*POSSIBLE SPOILERS*
We went to this film with high hopes. We left without them.
The film is surprisingly mean-spirited. For example, after the Red Queen sends off to his death a talking frog who serves her, she orders to have his children served to her as a meal since she adores "tadpoles on toast almost as much as I adore caviar." However, this same Red Queen is treated as childlike and amusing, and her acts of cruelty tend to be treated like burlesque slapstick by the camera direction and musical score.
The "heroic" White Queen is similarly cruel albeit in a dainty, soft-voiced fashion. Her cruelty, since it is mostly against the enemies she shares with the protagonists, are presented in the film as heroic.
The changes from the books are erratic. One moment, The Mad Hatter is happily odd; the next moment, he pitiably whimpers to Alice (with sympathetic musical score behind him) that he feels genuine fear that he might be losing his mind.
The film often seems to be plagiarizing the imagery of the Narnia films rather than replicating the Alice in Wonderland books. For example, the dormouse behaves like a bargain basement Reepicheep, and the line-up for the "Final War" resembles the "lining up for war" scene in the first Narnia film.
The Jabberwocky is true in appearance to the famous illustrations but otherwise painfully generic.
Finally, as I heard one person at the showing complain loudly, "Why are there so many eyes being stabbed in this film?"