Flawed...but harmless

Rating: 6/10 (29 March 2010)

Well, well, well. To start things off, I've been looking forward to seeing this movie ever since I first heard about it in 2007. I mean, seeing a Tim Burton adaptation of "Alice in Wonderland" sounded like a really cool idea, and having Johnny Depp, Alan Rickman and Christopher Lee in the cast? How can you go wrong? Well, after seeing it for the first time, it was quite a let down. First of all, this is a Disney movie, and it's kind of weird knowing that this is a remake of a movie that was made by the same company. Well, it's actually not a remake. This is actually a sequel that just so happens to have the same title. However, unlike Disney's line of direct-to-DVD sequels, for this one, they attempted to do something very different. A couple positives I can point out is that we get to know more about the characters such as Alice's last name as well as her sister's name, plus I did catch a lot of references to the original classic. The beginning was interesting, but once Alice came into Wonderland, things went downhill. It's like everything was just shoved into my face. I didn't care much for the story; it was a little untraditional. The characters were OK. The Mad Hatter was good, so was the caterpillar, the Red Queen was consistent, the Cheshire Cat was amusing, but the rest of the characters were just all over the place. It's like, What happened? What's going on? What's this? What's that? What's everything? The whole movie was so confusing. It seemed like the creators were putting special effects before story. The 1951 classic has a lot of charm and warmth, and it makes you look forward to watching it again, but this new one doesn't have the same warmth. Overall, this was not a terrible movie, nor was it a cinematic masterpiece; it's a good movie that has a lot of flaws. If you're wanting to see a good movie that'll live in your heart, then don't watch this movie; it's not worth your time, unless you're a huge fan of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. If you are a fan of them, then I'm sure you'll rank this as an A+ film, 10 out of 10, 5 stars out of 5, whatever. I'd really hate to see Disney do this to other classics they've done. (Oh, wait, I think they already did.) So, yeah, in conclusion, I highly recommend this film to Tim Burton fans and Johnny Depp fans, but not to fans of the original Disney classic.