First Hit: Despite the beautiful and curiously created scenes, the re-telling of this story was not compelling. The 3D effects were used to demonstrate as much as enhance the scenes and after a short while I could have left and I wouldn’t have missed anything.
Tim Burton is known for creating interesting visual worlds and for the most part he does it again in this re-telling of Lewis Carroll’s famous tale.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much more to this re-do except an expansion of the characters and a different plot which probably wasn’t intended by Carroll.
The fantasy and quirkiness of the original tale is gone and what we have is Alice (played by Mia Wasikowska) pondering a grown up decision at age 20. She is being asked her hand in marriage, but appears to struggle for the answer but how is this so hard? It is obvious that they aren’t a couple. She panics when asked in front of hundreds of people and runs away. She follows a vested rabbit into a hole and the now the story begins.
The Wonderland folks who greet her don’t know if she is the real Alice, and wonder if she is the original (sort of like the second coming). Alice herself doesn’t know because all she knows is that her name is Alice and it’s her dream, or so she thinks. She meets the Mad Hatter (played by Johnny Depp) who has a lisp, falls in love with Alice and is bent on helping Alice rescue a dog family and others from the Red Queen's castle.
The Red Queen (played by Helena Bonham Carter), who has a huge head and chops off the heads of anyone who crosses her, wants Alice captured because she is the one who is foretold (the original Alice In Wonderland story) as the slayer of the Jabberwocky who is the Red Queen’s main fighting force and protector.
But before Alice can be captured, Alice tries to rescue her fantasy friends who are locked in the Red Queen’s castle. To get across the moat, she walks across the bobbing heads of the Red Queens "off with their head" victims.
This scene sort of finished off the film for me. It moved it from fantasy and into a more Gothic heavy handed film that tries to make too much sense from the wild original tale of a little girl lost in Wonderland.
What we have is a grown up girl confused about making a decision about her life in the real world and her childhood dream overtakes her and through the spinning of this yarn, she gets her answer.
Wasikowska was interesting enough and did what the writer and director instructed her to do but she didn't bring a true sense of wonder to the role. Bonham Carter was probably the most interesting character in this version of the story. Her over sized head, fiery language and heart shaped lips were fun. Depp was quirky but why he played the Mad Hatter with a (sometimes) lisp was odd. Steven Fry the voice of the Cheshire cat was fun as a smiling disappearing cat. Anne Hathaway as the White Queen was lost and seemed clueless in this role. Matt Lucas the voice of Tweedledee and Tweedledum was funny at times. And Alan Rickman as the wise hookah smoke blowing Blue Caterpillar was overdone. Burton would have done well to do a remake of the original story to flaunt his greatness at making magical worlds. Making a complex story and plot took away from the original story and his beautiful scenes. Burton also needs to take a page out of James Cameron’s book on how to use 3D, we don’t need more demos of stuff sitting in our laps or being poked right at us.
Overall: This film ended up to be very disappointing despite the effort Burton put into making a wonderful “Wonderland”. This story is overly convoluted and would have been better if he had stuck to the original.