Misleading

Rating: 4/10 (16 March 2010)

Having read the original Lewis Carroll book "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass" (a gift for my 22nd birthday), I had been looking forward to seeing this adaption of the story. I can honestly say that this movie's adaptation is a far cry from the original story of Alice. *Warning: This is more a criticism of the overall movie than an actual review, so you may not want to read any further if you plan to see it*
I knew upon seeing the commercials and movie poster that the costumes would be overly freakish and nothing like Lewis Carroll would ever have imagined, but the movie itself is not like the book at all. In fact, the place where Alice goes is now called "Underland", thus completely disavowing the title (Then again, who would have gone to see "Alice in Underland"?)! The movie is about a grown-up Alice (19 years old and being proposed to by an idiotic lord) returning to Wonderland (Underland) to defeat the Red Queen and slay the Jabberwock on the Frabjous Day. This is where I'm going to get nit-picky: The plot itself is wrong. For those not familiar with the original book, I'll explain: 'Jabberwocky' was a poem that Alice read when she first entered the Looking Glass. It's about a little boy that is warned about the Jabberwock (a freakish-looking dragon), the Jubjub bird and 'the frumious Bandersnatch' (also incorrectly portrayed in this movie). It ends with the boy slaying the Jabberwock, and the cheer is "O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!". 'Jabberwocky' is all of a page long, yet here it's the surrounding plot of the movie! Tim Burton also gets it wrong with the actual characters. None of them are portrayed honestly (Alice's gentle nature comes the closest, but again she's supposed to be a young adult, not some naive child), but the one that stands out the most is how the Red Queen and the Queen of Hearts (as played by Helena Bonham Carter) have become the same person. In all fairness, The Red Queen was the one character in the movie that 'got noticed', and Bonham Carter certainly tried. Still, the two characters contradict one another: The Queen's soldiers are red playing cards, yet none of them are Hearts and there are a great deal more than ten; nor are they chess pieces, yet the battlefield is a chess board. Her character is understandably callous, but there's one important detail Burton forgot to research about the Queen of Hearts: While it's true that in the original "Alice in Wonderland" novel she constantly yells "Off with their heads!", the White Rabbit informs Alice that she never actually beheads anyone (nor does the Red Queen in "Through the Looking Glass"; she's more of a mischievous know-it-all). This wasn't brought up in the 1951 Disney movie either, but I bring it up here because this bit of trivia makes the Red Queen's bloodthirstiness (particularly the scene with Alice using severed heads as stepping stones through a blood-filled moat to break into the Red Queen's castle) completely moot! This, like many other happenings, was totally inappropriate to include into the body of a children's movie. I don't know how it got a PG rating.
All in all: I didn't outright hate it, but it could have been so much better if Tim Burton had stayed closer to the actual story. I give him credit for unlimited creativity and for avoiding the common mistake of trying to copy the Disney classic, but he really ought to stick to making movies aimed at teenagers and adults. This one is so outlandish and needlessly violent, it might give younger children a case of the frights. I suggest the original 1951 movie (I've never cared much for it, but my nieces love it) or the book for milder illustrations and some relatively harmless frippery.