Quite a pleasant night out.

Rating: 8/10 (1 March 2010)

Having read a less than enthusiastic review of the film, I wasn't expecting all that much. Though the reviewer did say that if you were a fan of Tim Burton, you'd be in first line waiting, and I suppose he was right in that.
When I went to buy my ticket, I was given glasses and realised it was in 3D! Didn't know this. Let me get this straight right now, if I had seen this before Avatar, I'd have wowed, but seeing it after, it made me realise the 3D effects were quite simplistic and I have now realised what a standard Cameron actually set. The film has obviously a budget much less than Avatar had, and a lot of corners have had to be cut. The 3D is indeed much less tooled, and, while it was nice (I think 3D particularly suits fantasy), it is not essential to see it this way, and 2D would serve the film quite well too. Let's get the bad bits over first: The CGI characters were cheap looking and some of them downright bad (Bayard, the horses); the CGI budget was blown on the Jabberwocky, who does deliver, in passing.
Burton obviously did not want to make another remake of Alice, so he got the idea to make her go back to Wonderland as an 18 year old; the side-effects of this is that it really feels like a sequel - Alice, the Return - and we know how much worse sequels are from the word go, probably because a story ought to finish with "and they lived happily ever after" and disturbing the dust afterwards feels contrived. So that when Alice arrives in Wonderland, we are subjected to a too long and tedious rehash and representation of all the characters. Burton might have been better off just doing something more different, rather than having to resume the first story in the first half of the film, which takes a while then to take off properly.
Alice is then 18, her father has died, and she is a wilfully delightful original girl, who daydreams all the time. She is invited to a grand ball, where her suitor, a young noble with digestive troubles, proposes to her. But Alice has seen the rabbit in the garden and flees to follow him, and go back to Wonderland, of which she has all forgotten about. In Wonderland, the red queen has overthrown the white queen and rules over beasts and men in a desolate kingdom. Alice is the promised one who can defeat the jabberwocky, dragony type monster who helped the red queen take over. She meets all her old friends and reluctantly embarks on this quest.
Once we've been reintroduced to all the characters, the story finally takes off. Helena Bonham Carter is a villain in the class of Basil Rathbone, Johnny Depp slowly takes over the whole show and Alice herself is an absolute joy. Stephen Fry as the Cheshire cat is simply brilliant. The other characters are somewhat blander, and some of them totally forgettable. (Alan Rickman as the caterpillar is of course fantastic, but he only appears to deliver bits of wisdom here and there and is not made the most of) My feeling throughout the whole thing was that Tim Burton couldn't make up his mind if he wanted a child's film or an adult film, and it veers from one to the other constantly, without much consistence. This is a shame. Disney produced the film, and it does feel as if Terry Gilliam had been taken over by Walt in a weird satanic internal struggle. Indeed there is a smattering of Python humour as well, and the crowd laughed a few times out loud. Once I laughed out loud myself, and I can't remember when that happened last in a cinema. 2/3rd of the way, I finally was totally engrossed in the story, Johnny Depp was growing exponentially in his role (even though his Scottish accent is shaky in places and even though it isn't all that different from Jack Sparrow to start with), and it ended in a total success (The epilogue might not have been entirely necessary - but Disneys and children and Hollywood must).
The general atmosphere of Wonderland was quite to very good, even with the budget obvious CGI limitations and it definitely had a Gilliam feel to it (well, it's Burton, isn't it), that fantasy tang, that I always failed to see in LOTR the movie* (which does look like random leather-clad dudes and trees walking across New-Zealand, let's face it. Actually, except that scene with Arwen at Aragorn's grave). It's probably the same bluey filter they use in the Guinness ads, and I love the feel of it. I thought the final confrontation was great. I wonder is Weta involved, or is John Howe involved, because it did remind me of Finarfin vs Morgoth (or St George vs. the dragon) *the white queen's castle is very reminiscent of Rivendell I must say.
So, for all its faults, I did enjoy the film very much and would go again, if only for Johnny Depp, who is disturbingly and magnetically attractive, even as a deformed fool.