Still an important date

Rating: 6/10 (18 September 2016)

Tim Burton has re-imagined Alice in Wonderland as some kind of quasi sequel as Alice (Mia Wasikowska) now an older teenager with a prospective groom on the horizon who she finds boring returns to what she remembers as underland by following a waist-coated rabbit down a hole which is ruled by the maniacal Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) who is avenging herself on her sister, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway).
The film takes time to get going and it is curious that if she has visited this place as a young girl which she thinks is all part of her dreams yet she has similar experiences as her previous visit. She shrinks and grows tall when she tastes different things and meets various characters as before like the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), the Cheshire Cat, the Knave (Crispin Glover) who does the dirty work for the Red Queen, the Caterpillar, Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
The film is fun once it gets going and the plot starts to gel, Burton has made the film visually dazzling. The Red Queen with a bulbous head is crazy, Depp's Mad Hatter is a little subdued yet psychedelic with a melancholy back story. Wasikowska though is a little dull as Alice rather than beguiling.