REVIEW: Not Much Dreamy In ‘Wonderland’
by Darin Miller“Alice in Wonderland” director is Tim Burton a recognized genius of signature atmospheric animation and cinematic story and style. The story’s screenwriter, Linda Woolverton, who has penned Disney classics like “The Lion King,” is also a masterful story-teller. But their styles hardly mix, and the surreal atmosphere of “Alice in Wonderland” can’t hide this fact.
“Alice in Wonderland” borrows elements of both of author Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, telling the story of a grown Alice who is set to marry the oafish son of her deceased father’s business partner. But as her trophy wife future pans out before her, she gets cold feet and flees her engagement party, inadvertently chasing a rabbit in a waistcoat and falling down a hole into a strange world. Once there, she learns that it is her destiny to rescue “Wonderland” from a swollen-headed Red Queen, obsessed with beheading others. As a rebellion brews in preparation for the foretold day of victory, Alice must reconcile that to save Wonderland she must battle the terrifying dragon-like Jabberwocky. Despite the dreamy atmosphere of Wonderland, Alice slowly realizes that if she accepts the task of slaying the Jabberwocky, it might kill her.
**SPOILERS COMING INCLUDING THE FINAL ACT**
Tim Burton’s vision is complete: dragon and horse flies with miniature dragon and rocking-horse bodies, decaying heads floating in the moat outside of the Red Queen’s castle, oddly shaped villains with long or lumpy bodies, vibrant colors everywhere. He expertly incorporates favorites from Carroll’s stories: food that makes you grow, drink that makes you shrink, talking animals, squat little twins, walking cards and chess pieces, and a tea party madder than September 12, 2009. But the story doesn’t quite match up. At the heart of the tale, we have a tame, Disney “classic” which has been told more effectively in “Mulan.” The film’s title character is portrayed as an early feminist, not content to sit back and let men have all the adventures. It doesn’t fit in the world of Wonderland.
While Burton has a long-running relationship with Disney, including the cult favorite “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” nothing about Burton is classic Disney. And everything about Woolverton is. Burton is about the quirks; Woolverton, the classics. What follows from their relationship starts in a stereotypical picture-perfect English party scene with understated characters who are all about conforming to societal norms. Thus, emotions are minimal. Mia Wasikowska, as Alice, should defy societal norms; instead she plays her emotions close, giving her performance a dreamy, trance-like quality for the better part of the film. Indeed, until Alice enters Wonderland, nothing drives the plot except the knowledge that at some point, we will get to a more interesting land.
But in Burton’s Wonderland, Wasikowska hardly wakes up, starkly contrasting her performance with Johnny Depp’s split personality Mad Hatter, Helena Bonham Carter’s spoiled and angry Red Queen, and even Anne Hathaway’s airy White Queen.
But visions sync beautifully in the Red versus White battle, as an army of playing cards clashed with an army of chess pieces led by a claymore-weilding Depp, accentuating Alice’s epic battle with the Jabberwocky. But Depp’s bizarre jig to out-of-context techno music immediately after the battle quickly breaks the spell. Even the White Queen looked a little embarrassed at the performance.
The film ends with Alice returning to England and, predictably, rejecting her suitor. She goes on to do greater things in classic Disney fashion. Avril Lavigne’s unspectacular “Alice” plays as the credits roll—a choice that pretty much sums up the film.
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28 Comments
But the important questions are:
Is Bush responsible for the Red Queen?
Is Bush caused global warming responsible for the Hatter being Mad?
Would Wonderland be a better world with Universal ObamaCare?
What about destruction and hatred spread by the Tea Party participants, especially the door mouse?
Is Bush=Hitler=The Red Queen?
Is Helena Bonham Carter still a slut?
These are the important questions and until you answer them, you sir are the WORSTEST PERSON IIIINNNNN THE WORLD!!!
Never had to be reviewed before. Was it the "S" word?
Major letdown. Average at best. All these people saying it's so great are being suckered by some cheap 3-D tricks. I love Burton, but this was another misfire from him.
it should be great but unfortunatley it is not…. another DVD night with the WIFE….
I personally liked it, but it wasn't amazing. Of course it is all a matter of opinion and I respect the opinions those who hated it too.
[...] Reviews: 1. Carl Kozlowski at Big Hollywood 2. Darin Miller at Big Hollywood 3. Debbie Schlussel 4. Sonny Bunch at the Weekly Standard 5. John Boot at Pajamas Media 6. Kurt [...]
I don't think Burton understood the Alice books. He claims he was disappointed in them when he was younger because they were just one-damn-thing-after-another and none of the characters had any motivation or sympathetic qualities. But I think that's what Wonderland was supposed to be – a place where ordinary logic and cause-and-effect do not exist. In some ways, it's the adult world seen through the eyes of a thoughtful, sensible child. “The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today.”
Unfortunately, Burton chose to explain Wonderland. He took a two completely psycho stories and made them conventional little narratives. He took away the fun wordplay, the twisted logical games, the randomness and dream/nightmare quality that made Wonderland what it was in the book. I thought that was a major mistake. This is definitely NOT my favorite Alice movie.
The kid saw it yesterday and said that while Depp was pretty good, the rest of the cast sucked and the 3D graphics were pathetic and mostly a waste of a 17-year old's time.
Ouch!
I was less unimpressed than you, so I considered this movie a disappointment, given what the partnering of Burton and Disney on a classic-inspired tale could have been. But maybe I just wasn't expecting as much as you were; I thought it was OK, and OK was OK with me. "Alice" was a pleasant evening diversion, and the 3-D made the fun more interesting than the film otherwise would have been. Hubby and I did a quick dine and dash before showtime at the steakhouse nearest the cineplex, and we were the only adult dining group in our area of that restaurant who were going/had been to "Alice" — as all the other couples and family groups we chattered with were going to "Shutter Island." I guess that captures much of this right there, in that the adults wanted more "adult" movie fare than "Alice" offered.
Haven't seen it yet – BUT you're right about the 3-D tricks. The studios are banking that the viewing public is going to want all our fantastic tent-pole adventure films in this "new technology". They've already credited the high water mark of this past years box office receipts to 3-D and it looks like they are going to head down THAT rabbit hole as a business model.
How about they start trying to make an old technology work first – a good story that engages the audience?
"….Linda Woolverton, who has penned Disney classics like “The Lion King,”…"
Curious. I personally thought the last good Disney animation film was Aladdin. (Aladdin was the weakest among Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid though.) I thought the Lion King and basically everything since was pretty bad.
As for this film, it still creeps me out and I'm -still- not entirely certain as to why. :-O
That might explain why he got it so wrong. I loved the books personally.
The moment I saw the trailer and realized Burton was twisting a childhood classic into a sermon on feminism, I knew the film was going to suck. There are only two reasons a director films a book differently from its original story – (1) the book isn't any good, or (2) the director isn't.
Burton just outed himself as either too stupid or too arrogant to understand a childrens' classic. Judging from the feedback from people who've seen this movie, it appears he's both.
I would agree substantially with this post, but wouldn't be quite so harsh. The film was very weak, not in its totality, but in its little bits. When I first heard Burton was back at Disney (believe it or not he started out there as an animator, and directed the brilliant short film Vincent while at Walt Disney Animation).
I think Miller is wrong. It wasn't Burton and Disney clashing (as Burton has said he preferred more narrative flow and more logic in the story), it was Burton and Carroll clashing. My hope for the film was that it would take Carroll delightful nonsense and illogic and add Burton's dark, gothic visual style on top. Instead of fun and twisted romp through Wonderland, we got a very prosaic story of the hero accepting her destiny. Not bad, but it was done better in Star Wars. There was also a bit too much seriousness in it. Everything that was happened in the movie was described as being oh-so-ever important. It eventually wore thin.
Having said that, I did enjoy many of the characters in the movie. Johnny Depp's Jack Hatter-I mean, Mad Sparrow- I mean-, well, you get the idea. It was fun to see him again in a slightly different context. The Red Queen was quite a bit of fun, as were most of the side characters like the tweedles, and the Cheshire Cat. Wish we'd seen more of Caterpillar as he was great. And I will say that this was one of the better used of 3-d in a movie (the best was Coraline, and Up was the absolute worst). The effect helped tell the story by making things more dimensional to give space, and less to make it cramped. Very good, glad we spent the money on it.
All in all, it was fairly good movie. Glad I saw it in the theatre, but could have been so, so much more.
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It was a much more interesting story back when it was called "American McGee's Alice", whose perpetually developmental hell'd movie version will now obviously never be made. Alice here has no character development, but at the same time she shows none of the rebel spirit of the book Alice. The plot of Alice (of the books or Liddell?) in an insane asylum after accidentally causing the death of her family, escaping to Wonderland (or not really?) and pulling herself to sanity by battling the Red Queen (who is, y'know…?) was much more interesting.
I can't believe how few comparisons have been made here. The confluence of the Red Queen (who was just obnoxious) with the Queen of Hearts (who was evil), the climactic battle with the Jabberwocky, the idea of an older Alice revisitng a warped Wonderland years later… What I most detested about Burton's version is that it kills all chance of a better movie that I've been waiting a long time for.
It's not the "Jabberwocky"! Jeez louise, that's the third place I've seen that mistake. The beast is, in fact, the Jabberwock. Jabberwocky was the title of the poem. Y'know the one:
Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimbel in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves,
The mome raths outgabe.
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son,
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch.
Beware the Jub-Jub bird and shun
The frumious bandersnatch."
Miller is only quoting the film, which identifies it multiple times as the Jabberwocky. Burton put the poem itself in the film and still made that mistake. I’ve also heard (and correct me if I’m wrong; I’ve never actually read the books) that the Helena Bonham Carter character is a mistaken conflation of two different villains from the books, the Queen of Hearts and the Red Queen. Shows how much Burton knows the source material.
Good Lord. Really? I haven't seen the film. What a horrible and easily corrected mistake. Here I've been misplacing blame.
I can tell you, I didn't want it more "adult." Yes, the kids liked it, but when you have Burton, you expect a level of .. well.. Burton in it. Sure, it looked a bit Burton, but I just didn't connect to it. When I watch Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I can tell he made it. It's got a level of twistedness in it that defines his movies. I just didn't see that in Alice. All the twistedness came right from the source material… there was no mark left on it.
I have to agree – the lack of crazy, sing-song randomness in Wonderland in the film sort of ruined it for me. The mad hatter was nowhere near mad enough and, really, there was too much plot. It took me a long time to realize why this movie just didn’t hit the spot and I really think it's because it doesn't have the soul that the books or even original Disney movie had. It's a shame. It was pretty though?
Sounds like the film should be titled "Kate Winslet's Annoying "Titanic" Character goes to Wonderland." For the last half-century film makers have been kicking the bejabbers out of "stuffy Victorian conformity" and every one of them acts like they just stumbled over the concept. I think that the last film I have seen where a Victorian-era woman acts like, well…a Victorian-era woman, was "The Importance of Being Earnest" and I mean the 1952 Michael Redgrave/Edith Evans version and not the 2002 Judi Dench edition.
The Alice books kicked the bejabbers out of stuffy Victorian conformity. That was the point. Alice is a little girl who's constantly beset by the confusing, seemingly random rules and restrictions that Victorian adults place on her. Everything from how to behave when meeting someone for the first time to the principles of grammar, math and logic. She tries to remember the rules and do the right thing, but in Wonderland the rules are changed or twisted – or sometimes taken too literally and to their logical extremes. She gets moved around like a piece in a very warped game of chess or played like a card in a psycho game of whist. It's not an escape – it's a nightmare for a little kid trying to learn how the world works.
Burton, with his adolescent Alice, took all that complexity and whittled it down to one thing – Alice learning to take control of her own destiny.
On thing about the story I'm not sure I understood. Alice's problem at the beginning of the story was that the course of her life was determined by everyone else's expectations. Then she goes to Wonderland where everyone believes she's *the* Alice who is *destined* to fight the Jabberwock and save Wonderland from the evil Red Queen. In other words, she's in yet another situation where she's expected to fulfill a role determined for her by other people. She stubbornly resists most of the way through, but then finally gives in to the others' wishes and faces her "destiny." Then she goes back home and is suddenly Her Own Woman – presumably because her adventure helped her discover herself – the "real" Alice, as opposed to the mouseburger from the beginning of the film.
So does that mean that giving in to other people's expectations makes you stronger as long as they expect you to do something really cool like fighting Jabberwocks? Or was the whole thing some kind of fucking metaphor about "facing your inner demons" or something. I hate metaphors like that…
On thing about the story I'm not sure I understood. Alice's problem at the beginning of the story was that the course of her life was determined by everyone else's expectations. Then she goes to Wonderland where everyone believes she's *the* Alice who is *destined* to fight the Jabberwock and save Wonderland from the evil Red Queen. In other words, she's in yet another situation where she's expected to fulfill a role determined for her by other people. She stubbornly resists most of the way through, but then finally gives in to the others' wishes and faces her "destiny." Then she goes back home and is suddenly Her Own Woman – presumably because her adventure helped her discover herself – the "real" Alice, as opposed to the mouseburger from the beginning of the film.
So does that mean that giving in to other people's expectations makes you stronger as long as they expect you to do something really cool like fighting Jabberwocks? Or was the whole thing some kind of fucking metaphor about "facing your inner demons" or something. I hate metaphors like that…
I like Tim Burton movies, and this one has great visuals. So why was a bored towards the end? It coulda' been a contendah, if it had been edited down by half an hour. And the ending: ichhhh.
I feel the same way – good analysis.
I completely agree. Maybe a point to be taken from the whole mess is that you shouldn't blindly be a non-conformist for the sake of being a non-conformist. Some traditions and norms exist for a very good reason. More important than being a non-conformist is doing the right thing, even when to conform would be easier. From that perspective, Alice does the "right thing" in Underland (seriously?), even though it's through conforming to everyone's expectations for her, and she does the right thing in the real world by throwing off everyone's expectations.
On a side note, I loved that she called out the batty old aunt at the end. I was dreading the whole, "It's fine for you to be the crazy kooky ol' aunt, you go girl" speech. Instead, Alice basically told her to stop feeling sorry for herself and get it together. That was nice.
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