Director: Tim Burton
Writer(s): Linda Woolverton

Cast:
Mia Wasikowska – Alice
Johnny Depp – Mad Hatter
Helena Bonham Carter – Red Queen
Anne Hathaway – White Queen
Crispin Glover – Stayne/Knave of Hearts
Matt Lucas – Tweedledee/dum
Stephen Fry – Cheshire Cat

Preamble:
A big failure – not nearly as bold as it should have been in that failure. Who is this shackled Tim Burton imposter?

Plot Points:
13 years after Alice’s last adventure, her father is dead, her imagination is wildly inappropriate for the stuffy world she lives in, and she’s just been proposed to by someone who repulses her. Running away, she stumbles into a post-apocalyptic Wonderland. The folks of “Underland” question whether she’s the chosen one they’ve been waiting for. “Chosen one” in this case being a champion ‘Alice’ due to use a famous sword to defeat the Red Queen’s vicious monster, Jabberwocky.

The Meat:
That’s right, Tim Burton has found the two things missing from Alice in Wonderland: bloated CG and the kind of god-awful, Hollywood, forced feminism found in such re-imaginings as ‘King Arthur’ and ‘300’. If you want an Alice that questions stuffy convention with trite exposition, uses a suit of armor, and rides a huge mythical beast, this is your movie. Completing the emo-cycle, Johnny Depp steps in as a very sensitive Mad Hatter, complete with tragic back story. As the feminine one in their relationship, he’s waited patiently for her return, and sacrifices himself repeatedly so that she may fulfill her destiny. Not to mention, he’s a genius with his needle and thread!

Is there a point down there?

Performances are hit or miss – one imagines Burton being too distracted with some of the technology involved to pay attention. Glover is good as the Knave of Hearts. Depp’s performance and accent are all over the place, and at turns echo Capt. Jack Sparrow and Willie Wonka. Anne Hathaway has moments as the White Queen, but is mostly forgettable and seemed to be a mockery of the character more than not. Mia Wasikowska does her best, but this simply isn’t an interesting antagonist. Isn’t it a bit much, to ask those familiar with the original stories to get excited over a 19 year old Alice fighting a dragon? Huge miscalculation. The one decision working out very well, though, was casting Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen. Her appearance does more to cause excitement than anything else in the movie, including Alice’s entrance to, and exit from, Wonderland. Most of the film’s funniest moments involve her, and the best visuals may be the severed heads that float along her castle’s moat.

It’s not clear what exactly Burton thought he was adding to Lewis Carroll’s mythos here. If he was so bothered by Alice’s origins, why not make a new fairy tale without the name branding? It would have lifted whatever restrictions prevented him from making real advancement of the story (adding slogans from the Spice Girls albums doesn’t count), and might have opened his famous imagination up to some new ideas. This also brings up the superiority of actual animation to so many of these live action/animation hybrid. The movements of the Knave of Hearts and a few other characters are distractingly stylized (although the Red Queen is perfect), and the quality of the backgrounds and costume designs can’t make up for it. I’d love to say that somewhere in here is a good movie, but the reality is that somewhere in here is a good story we’ve already seen told correctly.