Alice in Wonderland Review 3D (with clips. the Tim burton version. featuring Johnny Depp.)

Added: Mar 7, 2010

From: Jacktionman1

Duration: 4:17

Review of Alice and Wonderland, with clips and other tidbits.Disclaimer: I'm a bit of an Alice fan - I own Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland, the sequel, Alice Through the Looking Glass, and the album, Alice in Chains, so I may be a bit bias if the film does not honour the book. Which it doesn't.For Burton's adaptation, you can only assume that during the long drop down the rabbit hole, Alice clattered through a wardrobe and ended up in a Wonderland-cum-Narnia mash-up, full of nonsense and epic battle. I'm almost sure that scriptwriter Linda Woolverton got Lewis Carroll and C.S. Lewis confused somewhere along the line.The plot follows a 19-year old Alice struggling to find her 'muchness' in a Wonderland that has gone to pot (not the drug, despite the beautiful, out-of-this-world visuals suggesting so). She needs to acquire this before she can liberate the world from the wicked Red Queen, who has corrupted Wonderland and made the whole place bad. Alice had met the Queen years before, but no longer remembers any of it, despite urgings from the supporting cast that it had happened. By gaining her muchness, and with the help of the Vorpal sword, Alice can slay the Red Queen's weapon of mass destruction, the jabberwocky, and restore Wonderland to its usual state of harmonious disorder. The heroine is assisted in her task by a cast of lively helpers, although none featuring more prominently than Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. With the Hatter earning as much screen time as all the other supporting characters put together, it is really more a case of Alice and Johnny in Wonderland.This prominence is unfortunate, because Depp's slightly off-kilter performance, is awfully familiar and is now truly old hat. For anyone unacquainted with Depp's previous work, the Hatter will be a delight, otherwise, not so much.Other members of the support cast are much more unique. Stephen Fry (Cheshire Cat) and Barbara Windsor and most of the other all-star cast are as interesting as you'll find in a rabbit hole, and provide most of the entertainment. The March Hare and the Tweedle-twins offer effective comic relief, while the Red Queen is excellent and has some of the films best lines.The good lines are awfully thin on the ground, however, and it feels like the film is aimed at being a tribute to scenes from the book and animated version, rather than to Carroll's magnificent wordplay.This would be okay (*This would not be okay) if there was more fun to be had, but in this dystopic vision of Wonderland the tragedy of the past looms over the present and leaves the viewer more upset than either excited or mystified.At one point, there is a flashback to Alice's first journey in Wonderland, and I found myself wishing that the this was the feature I had spent money on, full of fun and madness, rather than just anger and madness.The film is well-paced, visually super stylish and beautifully gothic - another triumph of the aesthetic for Burton. It is also available in 3D, which has received mixed reviews, but I enjoyed it, even if it left me a little left behind at times when action raged around the screen.Unfortunately, the good-looks do not make up for a quite shallow plot (which only children might not notice) that, like Depp's acting, has a strong feeling of familiarity about it.The magic of the original Wonderland (both book and animated film as I haven't seen the others) is that Alice is exploring an expansive strange and endearing world, sort of bumbling along without a purpose. It is the characters, Alice included, that made the world an enjoyable place to visit.The same is true for the film. Unfortunately, however, the array of wonderful and well-performed characters are mercilessly sidelined in favour of a tired plot, making the inside of a rabbit hole less appealing than it could have been.Overall, any film that looks at such a rich resource as Alice in Wonderland will have its merits - in this case, as an action-adventure story aimed at children. While Burton's journey through the looking glass resulted in a film that magnified the plot of the movie ten-fold, it left the other wonders of Carroll's world sadly out-of-focus.

Channel: Entertainment

Tags: rabbit hole  wardrobe  queen  3d 

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