Film Review: Alice in Wonderland

Future generations will probably be able to divide Tim Burton’s better and lesser efforts not by whether or not they star Johnny Depp but rather his other muse Helena Bonham-Carter, with his weaker films tending to feature his real life partner. Lest I be accused of claiming her as some kind of Yoko Ono, It would probably be fairer to place the dividing line of quality at his curiously ham-fisted Planet of the Apes, a film whose biggest cultural legacy has been to put “re-imaging” into the Hollywood lexicon as way of saying “pointlessly remaking”. Sadly his new take of the classic Lewis Carroll story does little to buck the trend after Sweeny Todd's return to form in 2007.
The slightly re-jigged story sees a late-teenage Alice (wide-eyed newcomer Mia Wasikowska) – but possibly not the right Alice - as she escape her dreary Victorian existence and an unwanted arranged marriage by falling down a rabbit hole to Wonderland where she meets all the classic characters, including Depp’s Mad Hatter and Matt Lucas’ Tweedledee and Tweedledum and eventually accepts her destiny to overthrow the Red Queen (a film stealing Bonham-Carter).
The largely British cast (most of whom lend only their voices), including Michael Sheen, Alan Rickman, Christopher Lee, Barbara Windsor, Paul Whitehouse acquit themselves well, in particular a scenery chewing Crispin Glover and the peanut-butter­-and-jam casting (weird but it works) of Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat. Depp’s much publicised Mad Hatter falls curiously flat, however; a disappointing hodge-podge of his two previous Burton creations, two parts Willy Wonker to one part Sweeny Todd, only without the threat of the latter or the other-worldiness of the former.
Similarly, as with most of Burton’s post-millennial films, he seems curiously un-involved in the story itself, with most of his creative juices seemingly being spent on creating a breathtakingly weird Wonderland filled with giant mushrooms and curious creatures. The film has a striking look of it’s own and a brilliantly original use of CGI to misshape and deform many of the human actors, from the Red Queen’s bulbous head and Matt Lucas’ rotund bodies to Glover’s stretched and spindly Stayne. The 3D is used far less imaginatively – it might have been nice for the real world to have existed in 2D and only opened up into 3D when she enters Wonderland, for example – while the 3D technology itself compares unfavourably to other recent 3D efforts (*cough*Avatar*cough*) with only Cheshire Cat really amazing.
Also disappointing is Burton’s other frequent collaborator, Danny Elfman who provides a score of such dispiritingly workmanlike blandness (as he tends to these days – see also Terminator: Salvation, Wanted and the Spider Man franchise for further examples) that by the Futterwhack dance at the end I was convinced that they had hired someone who was trying to sound like Elfman and doing a bad job of it.
Ultimately Alice in Wonderland provides decent, easy, uncomplicated Easter entertainment that proves, if nothing else, that Burton is still one of the most visionary filmmakers (a term too-widely banded about these days) in Hollywood, but its otherwise workman like direction, unengaging, familiar, semi-sequel narrative and a mostly C-list cast it feel more like a direct-to-DVD sequel to an unseen Burton classic than the real return to form many might have hoped.