Alice in Wonderland (2010)

As many realize by now, Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland is not actually Alice in Wonderland. It's the sequel. 13 years after the original trip down the rabbit hole, we now join Alice as a young woman in Victorian times, stuck with the responsibilities of wearing a corset and stockings and marrying a dimwit with digestion issues. An entire party has been planned to see her accept this Lord's marriage proposal, but before she can be thrust into it she begins to see pieces of her dream running about; the same dream that she's been dreaming for 13 years.

Soon enough she's chasing the white rabbit down a hole by the side of a tree, falling and falling past an odd assortment of objects. She lands in the classic room with locked doors everywhere, a key that unlocks a small door she can't fit through, a potion that says "drink me" which makes her very small, and a cake that says "eat me" which makes her very large. So far, it's the classic Alice story. Until, suddenly, you are taken to the view of someone peeping through the small door's keyhole saying "You'd think she'd have remembered all this from the first time," and another saying, "You've got the wrong Alice!"

And honestly, they did get the wrong Alice for this movie. Mia Wasikowska is Burton's typical type of female, completely pale with long blond hair and a constant almost-dead look to her. Unfortunately, in picking his perfect body type for the role he ignored the one component that makes Alice in Wonderland so great: personality. Everyone in Wonderland had a distinct and very quirky but also very imaginative and interesting personality. Unfortunately, very few in Underland carry this quality. Alice is bland and boring, going through the paces but never emotionally invested or expressive about anything. Wasikowska simply didn't carry the spark of curiosity and imagination that Alice should have, and as a result almost everything else fell flat.

It certainly didn't help that in order to focus more on the relationship between Alice and the Mad Hatter (or just to give Depp more screen time), other characters were sacrificed. One would think in Burton's reimagining the Cheshire Cat would be wonderfully creepy and cryptic, but instead he almost seems an afterthought. He shows up, offers to heal her cuts from the Bandersnatch which she refuses, and then leads her to the Mad Hatter. Even voiced by Stephen Fry there's little personality to be had. Alan Rickman as the Caterpillar also does little to help things as he's relegated to a bland part where he tells the future, tells Alice she's not the right Alice, blows smoke in her face, disappears, and then comes back at the end to say "what I really meant is that back then you weren't the Alice you used to be but now you're much more like her. Now excuse me while I become a big ol metaphor for your story by becoming a pupa and then turning into a butterfly." And he does it all with not an ounce of character.

But surely if they spent less time on the minor characters that means the major characters got better treatment right? Wrong. Anne Hathaway channels her inner Mary Poppins as the White Queen with a few odd kicks like alchemy and reacting quite hilariously to bad smells, but still comes across reserved. Helena Bonham-Carter is one of the saving graces of this movie, especially when she first runs into Alice (who tricks her into thinking she's Um from Umbridge) in the garden and takes her to the throne room, but even the trademark paranoia and vindictiveness and constant need for rolling heads one would think she would be so good at portraying simply isn't there. Her apathy towards all things beneath her comes off wonderfully, but her calls for "Off with their heads!" lack the fury they so desperately need.

And then of course there's Burton's muse, Johnny Depp, as the Mad Hatter. One of the centerpieces of the plot, the characters, and the movie itself. A man who, according to Bonham-Carter in recent interviews, was basically given free reign to go as over-the-top as he liked. Instead what we get is a performance without any proper cohesiveness that constantly made me wonder just what kind of character he was trying to portray. Depp's Hatter carries a dual personality that comes out when he's angry and turns his eyes orange like his hair. For some reason he also randomly starts into a Scottish accent, though not just when he's the other personality. At times he's sheepish, and at others he's a stalwart subversive rogue. I understand he's the Mad Hatter and he's not supposed to make much sense, but to have him flip-flop so much in such inconsistent ways just screams poor direction/script/character choice instead of calculated insanity.

This is all not to mention the rather terrible "chosen one" plot they've all been thrown into which at times seems to try and reflect Alice's real-world situation, but once you look at all deeply into it is more just a vehicle to move the story along. When Alice arrives she is shown a scroll that shows her battling the Jabberwocke in full armor with the Vorpal Sword, and it's supposed to happen on a specific hard-to-pronounce-and-spell day. So she's forced into this situation where her future is dictated for her, much like it is in the real world. She then spends the rest of the movie battling between fulfilling her destiny or leaving the people of Underland to suffer. Long story short, she fulfills the prophecy and everything returns to "normal". As in, sorry, but you can't escape your destiny. Then she returns to the real world where she proceeds to turn down her future husband, make some uninspired offhand comments to the real-world counterparts of her enemies in Underland (which for the most part center on what she's learned, until she turns to two gossips and says something along the lines of "You two remind me of two odd boys I met in my dream (namely Tweedledee and Tweedledum)" which is frankly lazy script-writing and conveys absolutely nothing useful), and then proceeds to essentially take back her father's company from his friend who had kept it in trust by saying they should expand trade routes into China, and finally sails off on a boat while a blue butterfly lands on her shoulder.

So to recap, in Underland she learned that she can't escape the destiny imposed on her, and then she goes back to the real world and proceeds to completely change everything with, remarkably, no voiced complaints from anyone.

It just seems so lazily put together that you wonder what Burton was focusing on so much that he let the rest slide so easily. Was it the scenery? The graphics? Because while they were certainly weird they weren't anything special. The castles of the Red Queen and White Queen both highly resembled slightly redone versions of the Disney Castle. Was it the costumes? Because with the amount of times Alice switched dresses it seemed like they were launching a fashion line.

This is one of those kinds of films where every single person going completely over the top will not only not ruin the movie but would in fact improve it. But instead it appears many of them were just tired, reserved, and given a poor script and sloppy direction. And even with all this, I certainly didn't hate the movie. I didn't think it was amazing, but there were enough glimmers of a good movie in there to not dismiss it completely.

Alice in Wonderland (2010) gets a 6/10.