Better than most give it credit, and an actual plot!

Rating: 7/10 (17 March 2020)

I can't imagine a fantasy world more suited to Tim Burton's visual stylings than the insane place known as Wonderland, created by Lewis Carroll. I've often heard people criticize this film, and I can't figure out why, because I think it's actually one of Burton's best movies. It is a marvelous thing to behold, and has some wonderfully over-the-top performances. I also loved how they used the CGI in order to accentuate those performances and make things look a little off. Instead of entirely fabricating a Queen of Hearts, they have Helena Bonham Carter deliver a hilarious performance and then inflate her head to insane proportions with the computer. Even when things were entirely practical, there was an otherworldly style to them, like Anne Hathaway's playful performance as the White Queen. The one grounding force of the film is Mia Wasikowska, who is charming and comes across as normal, but gets gradually changed by the magical oddity of Underland.
The one downfall of this adventure of Alice in Wonderland is the inflation of the Mad Hatter's role, simply because Burton has a love for Johnny Depp. His character is relatively inconsequential in the story, but is forced in more often than anyone needs. There are even moments when the movie stops its forward progression so the Hatter can have a scene in the limelight. I'm all for broadening the characters in this story to make them resonate more, but I think it doesn't work that well here. Otherwise, this movie works great. But all of this should be taken with a grain of salt, because I have no affinity for the original animated Alice in Wonderland. What delights me about this movie is that it injects an actual plot into the seeming drug-induced nonsense of the original. Plus, it does all this without unwriting that movie, but implying it just happened in the past. I feel like I'm in the minority on this one, but Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland is a movie I'll gladly watch again anytime.