ALICE IN WONDERLAND

Extravagant but missing that precious quality that connotes that thing called enjoyment. That’s the gut reaction to Alice in Wonderland. Then again, it’s dicey to call this expensive 3D film “extravagant” because the visuals are dreck. But that is what happens when you try to turn a classic into something hip and contemporary for a new generation.


For reasons that are never explained to good purpose, the world is now called Underland and not Wonderland, although Alice (Mia Wasikowska, acting with her heavy and tense brow) has returned for the second time. She cannot remember the first time she was down there. But the creatures remember her, and the White Rabbitt (voiced by Michael Seen) and Cheshire Cat (voiced by Stephen Fry) act as her most obliging aides.

Alice is 19, and she has been thrown a garden party so a nerdy suitor can propose to her. Alice is no longer a girl but not quite a woman, and she excuses herself into a hedge maze before falling down a rabbit hole. These are the few fleeting enchanting scenes in the entire film. Although Fry as the Cheshire Cat manages to deliver lines that make you feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Much dialogue is spent with Alice convinced that it is just a very deep dream, and something will spark to wake her up. In her entire visit in Underland, she is looking to get out. In earlier incarnations of “Wonderland” the rabbit hole was a wonderful place to get lost in. Now in director Tim Burton’s muddy fantasia the return to the real world isn’t soon enough.

Movie buffs will look back at this in twenty years and observe this as the weakest use of 3D (if you happen to see it in 3D IMAX). After the dazzling depth of field of “Avatar,” the 3D experience of Burton’s “Wonderland” is seriously lackadaisical. Magical dragonfly organisms are lacking texture and look airy. Tweedledee and Tweedledum look like a couple of synthetic mushrooms with the authenticity of an old Nintendo game. Where’s the magic? The grubby plains and dead trees certainly don’t add up to a soothing sight either.

Liberal acts of creativity are demonstrated by punching up the Mad Hatter as a bigger character than in the Lewis Carroll books. The Mad Hatter, whose verbal patter is all razzmatazz, has to be rescued from the Red Queen before she commands execution (“Off with his head” is repeated endlessly), but you feel like they’re bigger players only so Burton (“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Sweeney Todd”) can spend more time with his favorite actors Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter.

Adventure builds to a climactic showdown between Alice and a Jabberwocky beast, and it is by this time that Burton’s entire visual palette for this film seems inspired by the work of Zack Snyder (“300”) and the videogame “Shadows of the Colossus.” Burton, in his newfound obsession for playing Frankenstein on beloved light-hearted classics, is the wrong director.

Isn’t the world hungry for “The Wizard of Oz” like beauty again? Another “Alice in Wonderland” adaptation could have facilitated that kind of movie lover’s craving, that craving for candyland fantasia. I would have chosen Tarsem Singh (“The Fall”) to direct. Burton is wrong, dead wrong, in his methodology and approach because his head seems stuck in the swamp.

I look forward to a new adaptation even though it would be a couple of decades before anybody tries this again. For the meantime, I’ll take the 1951 animated film of the same title, or Hiyao Miyazaki’s 2002 animated film “Spirited Away” which is as enchanting as any fantasy, and seeming closest cousin to Lewis Carroll, as any film in say the last twenty years. Take a look, Burton, wake the child inside again. File this “Alice” under biggest blunders of all time.

Go to the offical site at http://adisney.go.com/disneypictures/aliceinwonderland/

Grade: C-