Tim Burton appears to be always on the lookout for kooky stories that he can adapt and put his trademark gothic seal on; Burtonising, if you will. A few years ago Johnny Depp donned the suit of a paedophile in Burton’s reimagining of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, while more recently the same actor chopped up Londoners in the painfully slow Sweeney Todd. While the director’s films are certainly visually interesting and have a bizarre energy to them, for every Edward Scissorhands there is a Planet of the Apes, for every Batman a Mars Attacks. Burton’s latest venture comes in the form of Lewis Carroll’s best-known work, which you would think would be perfect hunting ground for the frazzled professor of Goth. A fairytale with a dark edge, twisted characters and nonsense poetry is less Wonderland and more Burtonland, but unfortunately Alice in Wonderland seems to be a wasted opportunity, an oddly paced collection of nice scenes instead of the engaging, fleshed-out adventure that it should be.
That said, when Burton gets it right, he can get it very right. Wonderland, while not as visually stunning as the worlds seen in The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, is still triumph of artistic direction. Alice moves from grey, shadow-filled forests to high-ceilinged palaces and chess-board battlegrounds with an ease which implies that Wonderland is never a constant environment. The castle of the White Queen (a floaty Anne Hathaway) is particularly impressive, as are the courtyards of the Red Queen’s (Helena Bonham Carter in scene-stealing mode) abode. There are other nice touches throughout, like the Northern-accented frogs in the court of the Red Queen and a brilliantly Burtonesque scene in which Alice (Mia Wasikowska playing a wooden plank) must get across a moat by hopping on recently offed heads. When a character is given the time to perform (no easy feat in such a crowded ensemble) the results are good, with the perfectly-cast Babs Windsor as the dormouse adding East End charm and the ethereal Cheshire Cat adding, well, wonder, with the soothing tones of Stephen Fry. The Cheshire Cat, perhaps the most famous of the characters in Wonderland, seems to be in the film out of tradition more than anything else, but at least when he does appear he has a calming influence on what it is a film which fails miserably to settle in the first half.
There are other glimmers of good film-making, with Johnny Depp giving what appears to be an effortless performance as the Mad Hatter, but when he’s not on screen you don’t miss him. His vocal-work is impressive, often using three or four voices in one sentence, but like the other characters, he is never really given time to settle down. Oh, and he does a funny dance at the end. Equally, Alan Rickman as the Caterpillar and Hathaway could be brilliantly realised fairytale characters, but it’s all just too crowded in Wonderland. Michael Sheen, perhaps the best British actor around at the moment, is completely wasted as the White Rabbit, and an opportunity to play some classic British comedy with Babs and Matt Lucas as Tweedle Dum/Dee is never attempted. The Little Britain actor channels Marjory Dawes and Pugsley Addams in his portrayal of the fat twins, and his role is reduced to nothing more than banalities. Performances aside, the final battle against the Jabberwocky (Christopher Lee) has potential, but is over before it has even begun.
The main problem with the film is pacing. It begins with a stereotypical Victorian-style wedding complete with stiff upper lipped Brits and a splash of colonialism, and it is all very ho-hum. The audience is waiting to revisit Wonderland, and the film is structured in such a way that we expect to be hit in the face with its beauty as soon as we can get out of this boring English countryside setting. However, Burton decides to make Alice fall down the rabbit hole and play out the most overlong scene since James Bond decided to have a round of golf with Goldfinger. She shrinks (slow), she grows (slower), she shrinks again (slowest), she forgets the key, she grows again, she shrinks again, she works out the riddle, level complete. It’s like watching a retard play Tomb Raider. And then, when the audience has been lulled into unconsciousness with all this growing lark BAM there’s the twins BAM there’s the White Rabbit BAM the dormouse BAM the dodo BAM the caterpillar makes an appearance and the Cheshire Cat turns up for no reason and then we’re at the Mat Hatter’s tea party and then we’re at the palace and so on and so forth until the slithy toves gyre and gimble in the wabe and you’re trying to find the connection between a raven and a writing desk and a writing desk and a raven and… then it finally calms down and you can go home.
There is a feeling throughout that the film was once about three days long and has had to be cut considerably. While the kids have got to retain attention for ninety minutes the disjointed pace is a bit patronising. All of this rushing around means that not one verbal exchange between the characters appears to be relevant or sincere, with the possible exception of the Hatter’s final dialogue with Alice. It does not help that Alice in Wonderland is stuck somewhere in the rabbit hole between sequel and remake, meaning that while we already know the characters involved in the story, there is a need for reintroduction which is never quite fulfilled. Many have complained about this misleading quality of the film, arguing that it should be called Alice’s Return to Underland or Alice 2: Judgement Day, but Tim Burton’s Blunderland will do just fine.
On the plus side, Burton does answer that pesky riddle about the raven and the writing desk. After the Hatter asks it four times, the answer is simple: You don’t care.
Keep posting stuff like this i really like it