Movie Notes: Alice In Wonderland
= 3 stars
Starring Mia Wasilkowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter
Directed by Tim Burton
Synopsis
Older and facing an arranged marriage, Alice (Mia Wasilkowska) returns to Underland (turns out she heard it wrong the first time), home of the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) and the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter).
The Good
- Thankfully, not a remake, but a remix featuring an older Alice, with Lewis Carroll works rearranged in a new way — Alice becomes the hero of the Jabberwocky poem. The older Alice’s gloomier, late adolescent mood informs the darker version of Underland.
- As expected from Burton, loads of inventive visuals and art direction. Loved the Cheshire Cat, tart-eating frogs, the White Queen, and the bizarre body distortions of the Red Queen’s gigantic head and the Knave’s (Crispin Glover) elongated body. When the two stand aside one another, it’s amusingly odd.
- Bonham Carter as the petulant, screaming Red Queen. Her oversized, yowling head, with perfectly-timed, goofy facial expressions, cuts through all the stifling CGI nonsense — that’s acting. Depp does good, too.
The Bad
- Despite a promising start, the rabbit-trail eventually leads to today’s standard, action movie conclusion: CGI character battle.
- Mediocre CGI, usually during that dangerous area where human actors interact with computer-generated ones. Unlike Avatar, the visuals aren’t amazing enough to make up for the mediocre story.
- Distracting silliness: Anne Hathaway’s ballerina poses, the Hatter resorting to dance, and an endless list of objects thrown about just for the sake of 3D.
Conclusion
The Alice in Wonderland tale (“lost girl” wanders into a strange world and learns some life-lessons) is by now, an animated movie cliche (Labyrinth, MirrorMask, Pan’s Labyrinth, Coraline), requiring extreme variation to make it worth the trip. Tim Burton’s version is solid entertainment; but I’d sooner return to Pan’s Labyrinth or Coraline’s basement than down this rabbit hole again.
IMDB: Alice In Wonderland (2010)
Wikipedia: Alice In Wonderland (2010)
Rotten Tomatoes: Alice In Wonderland (2010)
Interesting take. I have to agree with you on most of it. I also have to wonder if most of what we didn’t like about this film would have been different if it weren’t a “Disney” production; in other words, how much of the heavy-handed 3D nonsense, the “big battle” scene, and the stupid CGI dancing was added due to pressure from Disney execs? They don’t seem like typical Tim Burton characteristics to me.
That having been said, it’s always refreshing to see a story with true female heroines, even if it is the same old “lost girl” story. For every “lost girl” story, there are at least three hundred thousand “boy coming of age” stories.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the “Disney” aspect was responsible for some of the sillier aspects. Supposedly the “3D” was added on later in the process; if that decision came from above, surely some smaller ones came along with it, probably to make the flick more palatable to mainstream audiences. I really love some of Burton’s earlier stuff (Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood and even Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in particular) but lately he’s become pretty mainstream — acceptably creepy and gloomy to show in a mall cinemaplex. But of course this flick is raking in the bucks and that’s all Disney is going to care about. This “Burton-lite” formula is obviously working from the profit perspective.
The Alice story is an easy story for an animation studio to tell, since they get to show off imaginative visuals and crazy design in all the bizarre characters the heroine meets. Since the story is familiar, I just feel like there’s got to be some killer animation or significantly new plot variations for it to hold my interest. Avatar and Coraline had some truly amazing animation, and Pan’s Labyrinth had a whole parallel, adult story with Nazis (yeah, can’t really go wrong with Nazis).
JC and Jason bring up a good point with the Disney aspect. I too would expect that Disney execs would be more concerned with making the film more profitable, and to them, part of that would include making the movie 3D, with that being the latest thing, even if it doesn’t contribute in a meaningful way to the plot. I love the visual treatment in Tim Burton films, and Alice in Wonderland is no exception.
[…] Solid acting: Benning and Moore make a convincing duo, juggling relationship problems while raising two teenage kids. Ruffalo is great as the previously-unknown father, a scruffy, organic-everything dude running an eatery with the all-too-approriate name “WYSIWYG.” And Wasikowska’s acting prowess was completely CGI-obscured in Alice In Wonderland. […]