Imaginative visual imagery, little story to go with it

Rating: 4/10 (4 August 2012)

Tim Burton is one of those directors who can achieve greatness or blandness, and you're never quite sure which of those his next film will encompass. SWEENEY TODD, his recent adaptation of the musical, was tremendous, quickly becoming my favourite Burton film. ALICE IN WONDERLAND, his follow-up to SWEENEY, is undoubtedly one of his worst and could readily make up a double bill with the similarly underwhelming CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY.
The problem with ALICE IN WONDERLAND is that it's all about endless computer graphics with no real meat or substance to the script. There's no sense of gravitas to the story, no real characterisation, just repetitive scenes of Alice wandering a fantastic world and interacting with a series of animated characters played by typically British thespians.
The cast itself is astonishing: Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway, Crispin Glover, Matt Lucas, Michael Sheen, Stephen Fry, Christopher Lee, Michael Gough, Alan Rickman, Barbara Windsor, Timothy Spall...the list goes on and on. But 95% of those actors are wasted and deliver nothing that unknowns couldn't. Johnny Depp, who gives an energetic performance as the Mad Hatter, fares a lot better, but Bonham Carter's villain is shrill and irritating and as the lead, Mia Wasikowska is fairly bland and unappealing.
I admit that I found the CGI quite average; the worldscapes look good, full of colour and imagination, but the creations themselves just look like cartoons (take Tweedledum and Tweedledee as a case in point). The CGI works a lot better when it augments an existing performance, as in the case of Helena Bonham Carter's character. Some scenes, like those involving a CGI dog, should have just been shot live-action and it does feel like laziness sets in on occasion. You get the impression that Burton was so fixated on the visuals that he forgot to make a film of any real substance to go with them.