Alice against Lewis Carroll

Rating: 2/10 (2 April 2010)

I loved "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and remember it as an amazing and timeless adventure indeed. Alice wanders around in a world so enigmatic and unstable that you never know what will happen next, and what twist will put Alice in just new trouble, often unintentionally and tragically made worse by her own doing. Now this is all exactly what this movie does not have. After Alice arrives in the new 'underland', you will soon be in on the entire story: It is two sides, good against evil, and Alice is to slay a monster. Not a single second is unexpected. Nor are there any twists. (But even the first minutes are astonishingly wanting any concept: Scenes without any real characters rush by, there is no focus of attention in the opening.) But most of all, my understanding of then brand "Alice" is that she originally wanders around a dream land that confronts her with her own self, her anxieties, her shadowy anticipation that things will not be all nice and easy, all taking shape in landscapes, characters and events painted in dream-language. Of this essence, it should be no problem to create a movie that really leaves an impression - let alone, if Tim Burton is in the team. But there is nothing, nothing of this concept in this movie. Instead of joining a charismatic and mature character on the journey through her own dismal, natural instabilities that every one carries inside, the story here is already written, and Alice is only to follow marked footprints. For the only reason that... she is the one foretold to do it. There is merely the most silly 'hollywood-intellectualism', where 'good against evil' must be taken as, like, certainly some sort of metaphor representing all our everyday struggles, and it is so much about decision making and all... I'm devastated. Eventually, Tim Burton has added his potential for design to a movie completely without content. The only metaphor I see is Lewis Carroll appearing at the end in the figure of the Jabberwokie, and Alice, slaying him. Carroll is dead, long live 'Alice does Hollywood'.