Bland and a wasted opportunity

Rating: 3/10 (22 March 2010)

I went to see Alice expecting the perfect mix of one of the most original and surreal directors ever being given the perfect material from arguably the most surreal book in history - a wealth of ideas to interpret and create. Instead this was a hugely disappointing and bland experience that made me feel I wasn't watching work from the same director as Nightmare Before Christmas and Sleepy Hollow. The Alice books are dark and the imagery nightmarish. Even an interpretation made for children had the potential for many moments of dark or surreal, outlandish and off-the-wall plots and imagery but the film simply has no heart. There is little plot - characters are left hanging in the air with no development and it just seems to be an Alice 'checklist' - Drink Me, Eat Me, Cheshire Cat, Mad Hatter, March Hare, Queens etc. - all present and correct and all on screen for about 30 seconds with no reason why they are there. And the Mat Hatter is perfectly sane! Just with occasional bouts with confusion or self doubt but he soon pulls himself together. But overall the feeling is that there just isn't any direction or reason to have made this - it isn't the original book - that's fine but if you're going to take something that original and make a new vision then that vision had better be something special - and it just seems to be following the same generic formula of any other action Hollywood pic. The 3D as a mechanisms is not so bad but I do wonder when directors are going to realise that rushing 50 things past the screen at once doesn't allow the mind to focus on anything - I had to close my eyes for a few seconds a few times in the film (most notably when falling down the hole) because everything was just a blur - I had no time to follow anything so I waited until the whirlwind of CGI stopped - I had to do something similar with the first Transformers when you couldn't make out any single activity. Overall though really disappointing. My wife and I have long held that the perfect creative team would be Tim Burton directing, Johnny Depp as lead, a plot by Neil Gaman and music by The Cure - the four most original artists in their fields. Pleeeeaaasee Tim don't spend the last third of your career making rehashes.