Alice in Wonderland not so wonderful

Rating: 5/10 (7 March 2010)

It was 1:30 pm on a Friday afternoon and the IMAX theater as packed. I sat anxiously to see the new Alice in Wonderland, as I am a big Johnny Depp fan, and an even bigger Tim Burton fan. Finally the film begins and I sit back to enjoy the ride.
Alice in Wonderland is not the conventional story that we all know and have seen before. Instead Alice is much older and can not remember anything about wonderland except in constant nightmares that she has. While at a party a Lord proposes to her and she runs off only to fall down the rabbit hole once again. This time however wonderland is not so wonderful. The red queen( Helena Bonham Carter) has rule over the people and she is a very nasty person. Right away I was disappointed in the look of "underworld". The colors weren't vibrant, the landscape was not too imaginative, and the CGI was pretty poorly done. I will skip ahead in the movie a bit to when Alice meets The Mad Hatter(Johnny Depp). His character is absolutely demented in a very frightening way. Sometimes when he talks his voice changes pitch and he begins speaking like the devil almost. He is no longer happy but very depressed and only goes on about killing the Red Queen.
Speaking of the Red Queen when I first saw her Knave of Hearts Stayne I kept saying to myself "who is that he looks very familiar". It took awhile but during the scene where Stayne tries to molest Alice suddenly a light bulb in my head went off and I then said to myself "Holy crap thats George McFly!". Back to the future being one of my favorite movies, I couldn't take the Knave of Hearts as a bad ass he was suppose to be considering the actor played the ultimate wimp GEORGE FREAKING MCFLY! Wait what? Did I just say there was attempted molestation? Yep. Just to give you an idea of how grim this movie is, when Alice goes to meet the Red Queen she must cross a fetid moat filled with human heads, and since Alice is small at the time she has to jump on the heads to cross the moat. This isn't the cartoon Alice everyone knows.
Lovable characters like Cheshire Cat, the Tweedles, and even the Caterpillar Absolem are all very bland and no one stands out. I guess I liked Cheshire cat, but who doesn't like a cat that can float? Tweedledee and Tweedledum were just annoying. I liked how their faces looked, I got a chuckle out of that, but the acting done by Matt Lucas was pretty horrible. The Caterpillar Absolem is still puffing on his hookah. He somehow lost the ability to spell out stuff with the smoke like he did in the cartoon, which would have been an nice 3D effect.
Oh hey 3D I almost forgot to talk about that. Tim Burton when shooting for Alice in Wonderland opted to shoot using a regular 2D camera and then digitally convert the movie into 3D. Bad choice sir. There were several instances where things just did not look right at all. For instance right in the beginning I picked up on a tree that was 3D at the bottom but once it got to the top it went back to being 2D again, and was painfully obvious I have no Idea how it made it through post production. There were several gimmicky 3D moments which I absolutely hate. I think that the technology should be used for immersion into the movie, not some bug flying out of the screen where it had no purpose of even fitting in the movie. There were some cool 3D moments though I won't completely deny that. But they were so few and far between. Just to sort of give some kind of idea of the 3D effects, they were on par with the effect of the anaglyph red/cyan glasses, minus the blurring. Maybe Avatar spoiled me with what 3D can be, and I am being overly critical on Alice, but I don't think so. This movie did not feel polished and it did not have the typical character of what I come to expect from Tim Burton.
I will leave on a good note. The second half of the movie is actually really good, and the ending is spectacular. I finally started to feel the magic of "underworld". There were some very funny moments with The Mad Hatter and his crew. Mia Wasikowska also did an amazing job playing Alice.