Should have been called Johnny in Burtonland.

Rating: 5/10 (20 June 2010)

"All this talk of blood and slaying has put me off my tea."
I'm generally supportive of continuations/re-imaginings of well-known stories and movies. If the new chapter turns out well, great! If it doesn't, you can always just ignore it and pretend that it never existed. Alice in Wonderland falls somewhere in-between those categories. It's worth-while enough to justify its own existence, but not good enough to stand beside the original stories, or the excellent Disney animated movie.
This movie seems more like an excuse to revisit the cool characters of the original stories, than a proper stand-alone movie. Some of them are great, like the Chesire Cat and the Red Queen. Others...well let's just say that I thought it was a horrible idea to turn the Mad Hatter into a major character and base so much of the movie around him. I understand WHY Disney made the choice to go in that direction (look at all the money it made them), but I thought that character was just horrible. Every scene he was in seemed like a forced parody of what Alice in Wonderland should be.
That's a microcosm of my main complaint with the movie. Too much of the charm and cleverness of Carroll's writing was "Burtoned" out of the movie, and replaced with Tim's always noticeable style. I'm not asking for him to unimaginatively copy the style of the source material, but whenever Johnny Depp was on the screen, the movie usually ceased resembling anything like Alice in Wonderland.
On the positive side, I thought Mia Wasikowska made a fine Alice (though the "finding herself" subplot seemed completely tacked on and under-developed). Some of the backgrounds and CGI were great. And as I said before, I thought the Chesire Cat and Red Queen were excellent. I had a decent time watching it...once I let go of my previous expectations and accepted the fact that this was going to be another example of Burton being Burton. For better, or for worse.
I found myself wanting to like the movie, even in the face of its not so great aspects. Maybe if Burton could have reigned in his typical excesses a bit more, this could have been a great movie. As it stands, this is just another entry in The Wacky Adventures of Depp and Burton. With a slight Alice in Wonderland flavor.