Is Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland a good movie? I honestly metformin hcl 850 mg have no idea, but the parts I was awake for were terrible. I think I dozed off somewhere around when Alice meets the Cheshire cat and woke up during the execution scene. So that must mean something dramatic or at the very least loud happened to wake me up right? Well, no. That would be the fault of my friend who feels it’s his duty to provide offbeat in-theater commentary during all the big moments.
Just to top it all off, even though I’m guessing I had missed the middle 30-40 minutes of the film, I still had no trouble following the plot and understood exactly what was going on. It seemed to me like nothing of substance had happened during my snooze and all the participants were in basically the same place I saw them in an act prior. From talking to people after the movie I can only figure that this is because the characters don’t even know what’s happening most of the time and are generally more confused than the audience.
A number of people really seemed to enjoy Burton’s take on a universe they fondly remembered from childhood (needless to say it was not a part of mine), if only for the level of artistry he splashes across the screen to a whole new level, even for him. I can give Burton this much, his Wonderland is a buffet of imaginatively conceived whimsical and sometimes disturbing elements throughout. And if that’s what you want from a Burton film and is all you came for then I can see someone really enjoying this movie.
To the extent of creating, or in this case reimagining a fantasy world with all the vivid detail your eyes can handle, Alice in Wonderland is a success. Almost everywhere else it falls miserably flat. With some of Burton’s recent films I get the sense that he gives up on telling a story entirely and devotes all of his time and energy to perfecting his visual style. It’s almost like he realizes that people primarily come to his movies to be wowed by the surreal, so the need to develop much of anything beyond the purely visual scope is unnecessary. Burton obviously can tell a great story when he wants to, but now he seems content to let that fall by the wayside because he thinks we don’t need it to enjoy his movies.
“Oh, but you weren’t awake for enough of it to fully grasp the story that Tim was telling!” I can already hear the Big Fish faithful moaning.
“Ah yes, but it was the very lack of intriguing material and a focused narrative that made me fall into my own personal rabbit hole to begin with!” I counter.
I will concede that perhaps with a second viewing maybe I might find some small token that makes Alice’s amnesia-clouded return to Wonderland click for me where it didn’t the first time. But since I have no intention of allowing a second viewing to take place, I stand by my current assessment.
There are just too many major things that are glaringly wrong with this movie for me to do a 180 on it. Are we really supposed to believe that Alice thinks that her first trip to Wonderland was a dream when she has a free-thinking father that encourages her to use her believe in the impossible? How can not one of the other characters recognize her for certain? I actually really liked the idea of this film being more of a sequel than a retelling, but it stays too close to the events of the original tale and the plot devices used to connect them aren’t convincing and just plain don’t work.
There are some things I appreciated other than the visuals. Anything Alan Rickman does is gold and his version of Absolem the caterpillar is no exception. Couldn’t they have put his face onto it though? Rickman’s features on a hookah-smoking caterpillar would have been hysterical awesomeness. Absolem could use a hand in preparing his hookah however, as the amount of smoke coming from the bowl shows that he clearly placed the coals too close to the tobacco. Movie characters can never seem to get their shisha right. Belloq looked like he was struggling mightily to get any smoke at all out of his hookah in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The Mad Hatter’s fighting techniques were hilarious. The man is deadly with a hat pin. That said, this is one of the weakest performances of Johnny Depp’s career. I know the Hatter is obviously supposed to be mad and I believe that Depp probably had a well thought out reason for portraying him as he did, but whatever it was doesn’t resonate at all. I felt like I was watching Mike Meyers’ impression of him playing the Mad Hatter rather than the clever creativity we have come to expect from Depp.
I actually enjoyed Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen. She is excellent as the cranially misshapen, tyrannical monarch who can be set off by the slightest discord with her will. The Red Queen is perhaps the one character that I feel truly works. Ann Hathaway’s White Queen however is just weird, though not in the sense Burton characters are expected to be. She is supposed to be just as psychologically unstable as her sister, just in a much less malevolent way, but her mannerisms completely took me out of the movie (hey, maybe that’s good!). She always keeps her arms held up above her shoulders like a painting from an old fairy tale book. I was waiting for her to bust out hand puppets at any moment.
Tim Burton clearly had some very clear ideas about what he wanted to accomplish with his vision of Alice in Wonderland. A few of these ideas made for some amusing moments, but most of them fail before you can even understand the reasoning behind them. Unless of course, that middle half-hour was the crux of the whole film…
Overall: 2 out of 10
Directed by Tim Burton. Written by Linda Woolverton. Cinematography by Dariusz Wolski. Edited by Chris Lebenzon. Production Design by Robert Stromberg. Also Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway, and Crispin Glover.
