It must first be said that I did not see Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland in 3D. Blasphemous, I know, but it did clue me in to something I would have missed had I been watching the full, glorious, multi-dimensional version.
As 3D takes more steps toward becoming a legitimate part of our viewing experience, movie, television and game developers must be careful not to cross the line between "viewing enhancement" and "gimmick."
I'm sure everything looked spectacular in 3D, but a few too many odd angle choices and objects being thrown at the camera proved distracting in this particular film.
Also, there are three scenes of someone riding an animal/beast across a large landscape with orchestral music blasting in the background. Fine the first time, but I can't help but guess these scenes looked particularly pretty in 3D, thus justifying their frequent use. Otherwise, I was left baffled by the recurring treks.
Also used to the point of distraction were the CG effects. I'm reminded of a scene in one of the Hannibal novels where the good doctor informs Clarice dining room decorations are tricky. Too little is fine and too much is fine. Fall in the middle, though, and it can look like a mess. District 9 would be an example of the former with Avatar being the latter.
Alice in Wonderland, though, adds in a few special effects where they really don't need to be. Making the Mad Hatter's eyes all ga-ga was fine but I could not get over the Red Queen's ginormous head nor the Naive of Hearts' ridiculously long limbs. I hate to use the word "distracting" more than once in a single review, but there you have it. These proportions were actually integral to the plot, but I could care less when their inclusion takes me out of the scene.
Taken as a whole, the pacing was all over the place, but otherwise, I actually enjoyed the film. Hard to believe, considering all my gripes, but it's true.
Tim Burton's imagination shines brightly (it would have been brighter had Disney loosened the collar a bit), all of the performances were enjoyable and, despite the lack of 3D, most of the visuals were rather amazing.
I don't know if this return trip to Wonderland was necessary but fans of the world should walk away happy. Everyone else, though, should probably avoid the rabbit hole this time around unless it is with big 3D glasses strapped to your face.
Tim Burton's adaptation of Alice in Wonderland (combined with his poem "Jabberwocky" and the other Alice novel Through the Looking Glass) is pretty much as you'd expect: a fantastical fractured fairy tale with captivatingly strange talking creatures, trademarked curved branches, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter.
Sadly, it doesn't surprise.
The movie is as meandering as the rabbit hole...twisting, turning, seeming not to have a purpose other than to share quirky visions of Underland. And, in fair disclosure, I am quite tired of CGI created worlds (a little goes a long way), and while it showcases an imagination without bounds, I still love (and always will) a fresh, honest-to-goodness, hand-created vision (see: Fantastic Mr. Fox). His view of the world I pictured to be green and lush and full of wonderful colorful creatures looked like it had been bombed out. It was a wasteland in shades of gray and black. It seemed like everything had to be tampered with: the length of someone's legs, the shape of a head, the color of eyes...everything. Mr. Burton couldn't keep his fingers off the computer long enough to make a movie that the audience would care about.
Oddly enough, those members of the court following the Red Queen made themselves appear to be odd and misshapen to please her highness by ADDING PROSTHETICS to their bodies and faces that kept coming unglued, threatening their very oddness.
Comical irony? Perhaps. But it was, to clarify, very much part of the plot.
Alice is visiting Underland for a second time, although she cannot remember the first time. She doesn't want to be there, but she doesn't want to be above ground, either, where a sniveling red-headed louse is awaiting her response to a marriage proposal. However, she doesn't try very hard to leave. In fact, she doesn't try very hard to do anything. She just is. And she just frowns. Unlike the lines I remember reading "...curiouser and curiouser...", our Alice seems bored.
Along the way (although I'm never quite sure where she's going), she meets the expected array of characters. The White Rabbit is a great representation of the original, charming and hurried in his tiny waistcoat, clutching his watch. The March Hare looks like a meth addict with twitches to spare. Tweedledee and Tweedledum are round, dough boys who argue and cling to one another. The Cheshire Cat, gray and electric blue (he should be pink and purple!) is the most fascinating, appearing here and disappearing there. Oh, and don't forget the opium smoking caterpillar, who is angry and unamused by our Alice.
In the human (and I use the term loosely) camp, we have the Mad Hatter, Johnny Deep as Elijah Wood.
He's a red headed, gleaming emerald eyed, nut job who speaks with the voice of a Scotsman (why?). He weird, for sure, and doesn't seem to make sense. He's got a great two second nod to his previous incarnation as Edward, in which he yanks Alice's too large dress, cuts away at the fabric, and creates a Barbie Doll sized gown. The rest of the time, he's too skewed to worry about. On the other side of the coin, there's Burton's muse, Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen. Her big head ("Big head, big head, big head!") is amusing, as are her heart painted lips, but she's difficult to understand save for her incessant whining. "Off with his head!" She's mean and angry and unliked but feared by all. Last, but not least, is the White Queen, played by a icy Anne Hathaway, painted black on her nails, her eyebrows, and her lips for no apparent reason. She takes on a Snow White-esque affectation in which she flails her arms around and winks at the woodland creatures.
In the end, the White Queen needs a champion, and you're supposed to wonder if Alice, who has expressed no desire, shown no spunk, has no drive will step up --- legend says she's the only one who can --- to fight the Red Queen's champion, the dastardly looking dragon, a reject from a darker version of Eragon, called the Jabberwocky. I'll let you guess who wins.
But I will tell you that the Mad Hatter does a totally ridiculous, turn your head in embarrassment dance upon victory. It's unexplainably bad.
While the book, published in 1865 and arguably one of the best satires on modern culture available, operates as both a fantasy for children with spooky queens, dark rabbit holes, and tea parties attended by bizarrely self-absorbed animals and people, and a parody for adults of the upper class told with a wink and a nudge, the levels of narcissism reached by chattering and bumbling characters who have nary a concern for another previously unseen.
The movie adaptation was bound to be made by Mr. Burton, the king of strange tales. He shines when creating his own original works of art (see: Nightmare Before Christmas, Beetlejuice, and Edward Scissorhands) and needs an editing eye when working from someone else's specs (see: Charlie and The Chocolate Factory and Batman). He'd like to teach you a lesson as you fall down the rabbit hole, to offer a cynical take on a fairy tale that appeals to both adults and children, but he mostly offers a muddled tale.
The lesson? Don't mess with classics. Create your own.
The Tim Burton / Disney Studio reboot of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland is welcome for its decision to truly adapt the source material for the big budget movie audience.
As I left the film I wondered if, in forty years' time, the movie might well play on tv (I'm assuming tv will endure) as regularly as the Disney Studio adaptation of Mary Poppins has done. This is the third time that the Disney Studio has adapted the Alice stories. In the 1920s, Walt Disney produced a number of shorts combining live action and animation to tell Alice's adventures.
Like Avatar, the underrated A Chrisftmas Carol, and The Polar Express, Alice reinforces the fascinations of the performance capture / digitally rendered milieu that is rapidly defining the aesthetic of the big bugdet popular fantasy film. Some years ago, the point was made that film could, and would, become more like painting than photography. The lavishly rendered fantasy format has arrived at that place.
The carnivalesque quality that has always characterised Tim Burton's films finds its place in Alice, and perhaps most appropriately Tim Burton's origins in animation get the fullest workout in this film since his production The Nightmare Before Christmas.
There's something quite controlled about the narrative shape of Alice. The story doesn't sprawl and there's a clear, organised structure to it. It reminded of me that other recently produced, Disney movie, Enchanted and the Jim Henson movie, Labyrinth which, during its release in 1986 clearly stated its debt to the Alice stories. It was Steven Spielberg's Hook that came most readily to mind, though, in watching Burton's film. The character of Alice is a vintage Burton hero, reaching back to Vincent in Burton's animated short film of the same name.
Some reviews of Burton's film have observed how the film moves , unoriginally, towards a digitally rendered battle but I felt that , rightly so, the chessboard battle gets sidelined in order to focus on Alice's moment of self transformation in her showdown with ... the voice of Christopher Lee.
The otherworldly adventure that Alice undertakes ultimately impacts, and empowers, the real life that she goes on to leads.
Megan and I saw the new Alice in Wonderland last night and though the story was interesting I got tired of seeing the excessive CG. This is something hollywood keeps falling into as a pitfall. Add too much CG and it just doesn't seem real anymore.
I remember when Jurassic Park came out. I was amazed at how real it looked. Since that time however movies either have just enough CG in to make it seem real or go way overboard in the process.
I just got home from seeing Alice in Wonderland in Imax 3-D. Firstly, if you ever go to the Jordan's Imax theater in Reading, MA, make sure that you get there early. We got there ten minutes before showtime and had to sit much too close to the screen, so I spent the first ten minutes of the film waiting for my eyeballs to acclimate. Secondly, I've finally decided that I'm really not down with this whole 3-D revolution. Whenever there's motion on screen everything gets all blurry, and I find that unless I keep my head aimed straight ahead, the image doesn't look quite right. I find this extremely distracting and it always pulls me out of the film. Does that happen to everyone else, or just to me?
As for the film itself, I have some pretty strong opinions. Everyone has been saying that this is the single most divisive film of the year. I've spoken with two people since viewing the film. Person number one loved it, saying that he considered it "far better than Avatar", while person number two not only despised the film, but has decided that he may be losing faith in Tim Burton as a filmmaker.
I'm not sure if I can bring myself to say that I 'hated' Alice in Wonderland, but I sure didn't like it, any of it, at all. Also, I tend to agree with person number two about Tim Burton. The last film that he made that I love was 1994's Ed Wood. God I love that movie. 1996's Mars Attacks was enjoyable, in a fun, pulpy kind of awesomeness, and I really enjoyed, but didn't love, 2003's Big Fish. Everything else directed by Burton in the past decade and change has ranged from the passable, Sweeney Todd, to the terrible, Planet of the Apes. This film ranks up there (or down there) with his worst.
I'm not sure why Burton decided to make a Hook-like sequel to the original story, instead of just remaking the original. While I have no problem with the fact that this film is a sequel, what I do have a problem with is the fact that this sequel lacks any of the charm, wit and fun that the original had in spades (HAHAHA a card pun in an Alice in Wonderland Review!) The story here is paper thin. Onion paper thin. It makes the story in Avatar seem deep by comparison. Here's the "story":
Alice, Mia Wasikowska, is now a young woman. She has no recollection of her childhood adventures in Wonderland, but every night, much to her confusion, she dreams the same dream about disappearing cats and talking caterpillars. At the beginning of the film she is at an aristocratic society function where she learns that a very rich, yet awkward and ugly, nobleman plans to ask for her hand in marriage. Alice doesn't want to marry him, and she follows a white rabbit in a top-coat down a rabbit hole to Wonderland. Once in Wonderland we learn that the Red Queen has assumed control, and is chopping everyone's head off like crazy. There's a magical piece of parchment that predicts that Alice is destined to kill the queen's pet Jabberwocky (some big dragon that breathes lightning) on some holiday, and freedom will be brought to the land. The rest of the movie is Alice running around telling everyone that she's dreaming as we're taken on a veritable "who's who" of Wonderland as Alice is reunited with all her old friends and enemies.
Johnny Depp is annoying as the Mad Hatter. I've hated his appearance in this film since the very first production stills were released almost a year ago, but I was holding on to a little bit of hope that he might be able to do something fun and interesting with the character. He doesn't. He never comes across as particularly 'mad'. Aside from speaking in two distinctive accents, one of them Scottish, and doing some bizarre dance at the end of the film, he doesn't really do anything crazy. Oh, every once in a while he gets pretty excited about what he's talking about and someone has to cut him off. Pretty crazy!
Did you know that Anne Hathaway is in this film? I had no idea until she showed up halfway through dressed as the White Queen. Why is Anne Hathaway in this movie? There's not a moment when she's on screen that you won't be looking at her thinking, "Hey! You're Anne Hathaway. Why are you here?" That's because every moment she's on screen there is an expression on her face that says, "Hey! I'm Anne Hathaway. Why am I here?" It's really just one of those bizarre WTF casting decisions...
I really don't like the look of anything in this movie, aside from Tweele Dum and Tweedle Dee and Helena Bonham Carter's giant-headed Red Queen. If there was one thing in this film that I 'almost' enjoyed, it was Bonham Carter, but after she said, "Off with his head!" for the twelfth time, I began to find her pretty annoying.
There's a moment near the end of the film where Alice finally admits to herself that she isn't dreaming, and is ready to accept her destiny and slay the Jabberwocky. It's supposed to be a grand, epic moment, but packs all the emotional punch of an episode of Garfield and Friends.
Why is Alice the only one who can wield the magical sword and slay the Jabberwocky? Why is Alice warned that the sword must not be used for anything aside from this single purpose? Why does Johnny Depp always need to wear white face paint in Tim Burton's movies? These are just a few of the questions that this film raises but fails to answer.
Go read Lewis Carroll's novel, or watch the Disney animated film. Or, go see this movie, since it appears that (somehow) approximately fifty percent of the people who see it have an opinion that completely opposes mine.
I saw Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland in 3D the other day, and left the cinema feeling a little underwhelmed. In the hours that have passed since, I find myself with a far stronger opinion about the film that a British critic recently referred to as a "bums in the air fiasco" with a lead actress who "looked like she was on heroin".
With a deathly slow beginning, Alice inevitably tumbles down the rabbit hole to discover dodgy CGI, some poor usage of the 3D technology, and some really sub-par performances from otherwise excellent actors. The only people who fare well are the pure CGI characters voiced by some quality British thesps-particularly Michael Sheen as the White Rabbit and the wonderful Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat. Fry's voicing of Ches is pitch-perfect, and the film's real shining light. Johnny Depp, however, fares poorly with a caricature so heavily made up that he does not so much as disappear into the character, as he does get entirely buried. Depp's Hatter is insane in a way that is not humourous, not interesting, and criminally boring. Easily his worst to date. That said, I suppose even the best of the best are allowed a rare miss from time to time, so I can't hold it against him (too much).
It's unfortunate because Tim Burton is capable of so much better. I don't need to list a bunch of films that he's done that are better than Alice-go on imdb.com and choose any from the list. The set designs, the gnarled up gothic trees... it should have been an amazing aesthetic. But I suppose having seen other Tim Burton films, the set pieces and the environment just felt flat and predictable. You will see nothing in this film that Tim Burton has not done before.
Worst of all is the leading lady, I'm afraid. At the forefront of the film, Mia Wasikowska is the movie's cold, dead heart. She has no presence, generates no sympathy or interest, and really does look like she's coming down off a huge weekend of mad clubbing with the aid of a disco biscuit or three. It's such a shame because it's always nice to see a fellow Aussie doing well in Hollywood... fingers crossed that she fares better in Jane Eyre opposite Michael Fassbender.
So... yeah. All in all it really sucked for me... way more in retrospect than it did at the time. That said there is an upside... we have officially proven that 3D filmmaking does not replace good storytelling. I would have been far happier paying for a 2D experience with a lead actress who didn't feel like a boring abyss of cold despair... but then again that's probably just me being picky.
It must first be said that I did not see Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland in 3D. Blasphemous, I know, but it did clue me in to something I would have missed had I been watching the full, glorious, multi-dimensional version.
