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Last Friday, Tim Burton, Johnny Depp and Lewis Carroll, fell down a rabbit hole and landed in theaters everywhere. Complete with 3-D glasses, Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” returns to the big screen, revived by Burton’s distinctively morbid and not-so-Disney spirit.
Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland,” derived from the book by Lewis Carroll, is worth the price of admission, but is ultimately miss-able.
Burton’s Alice (played by Mia Wasikowska) is a young woman who discovers she’s on the verge of an arranged marriage at her surprise engagement party; her would-be fiancé pops the question in front of a crowd of party guests and family. Due to the weight of duty and expectation upon her, Alice asks for just a minute to think things over and runs off.
Tumbling down a rabbit hole, she embarks on a journey to find herself and an answer she can live with.
Upon tumbling into “Underland,” the shadowy story book characters interrogate her to discover if she is “the right Alice,” who will free Underland from the Red Queen’s evil reign and restore power to the White Queen (played by Anne Hathaway). Only the insane Mad Hatter (played by Depp) believes she is “the right” Alice.
As Carroll’s Alice might put it, the movie was very original and contrary-wise, derivative.
There are many moments that are reminiscent of other movies such as, “The Wizard of Oz,” “Chronicles of Narnia,” and “The Addams Family” to name a few. Overall, however, there is enough innovation in plot and character that a question arises: how are Carroll’s characters and Wonderland indispensable the story that screen writer Linda Woovlerton is telling in her screenplay?
The movie isn’t the original story, nor is it a satire like Carroll’s original work. Setting everything in the context of “Alice in Wonderland” comes across as a gimmick, like showing it in 3-D. Going out on the limb a little further, the movie could easily have become an original work.
One of the curious points of the movie is how much humanity and depth is given to the Red Queen (played by Helena Bonham Carter, the mother of Burton’s son). The Red Queen is a fully developed character, making it difficult to believe she’s as evil as she needs to be for the movie to truly work.
Meanwhile, the White Queen seems to fill only one role: to provide somewhere for the power to shift if the real Alice is found and fulfills her destiny. In this fantasy of good vs. evil, the White Queen falls tragically short of representing the forces of good at a fantastic scale, seeming too reminiscent of the world of obligation, white-washed cruelty and false perfection Alice lives in.
Like Alice’s sword and armor, thematically, the movie shines. It affirms believing in the impossible (six things before breakfast at least), the dreamer taking charge of his of her own dream, and being true to oneself. One of the movie’s brilliant, refreshing and spiritually invigorating moments comes when Alice is faced with an archetypical heroic dilemma: “how to get past the guard dog.”
This PG movie runs 108 minutes and is sure to leave audience members pondering impossible things and “Why does Johnny Depp look like an acid tripping Madonna?”
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