Alice in Wonderland – Hype Addict Review

Having had the great fortune to be at the UK’s IMAX premiere of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, I feel obligated to enthuse about the IMAX at Waterloo. With a screen 20 metres high by 26 metres acros, 11,600 watt sound system and full 3D digital projection, It has to be one of the greatest cinema experiences imaginable (until they introduce D-Box in the UK anyway). It’s a big airy cinema, with friendly staff and well priced snacks that is miles ahead of your average multiplex in terms of enjoyment. Anyway… IMAX rave over… what about the film?

Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland is a sequel of sorts to Lewis Carroll’s books Alice’s Adventure In Wonderland at its sequel Through The Looking Glass. It is set ten years after Alice’s first venture into Wonderland, and the 19-year-old is having dreams of rabbits in waistcoats having forgotten her first foray down the rabbit hole. To cut a long story short, she ends up back in Wonderland, meets all your favourite characters, does all the same things again, and so on and so forth.

With its imaginative visuals and dizzying 3D, Tim Burton’s Alice is not a wholly unenjoyable trip to the movies, but for me, it was one of the most annoying films I’ve seen in a long time. With only very sleight nods to Disney’s first animated foray into Wonderland, anyone expecting the visuals treats and gentle whimsical humour of the animated original will be sorely disappointed. The live action ‘real world’ sections are so woodenly acted and slow moving, its almost as if Burton just filmed the cast rehearsing, it’s just so dull, but things don’t even get much better once she tumbles down the rabbit hole.

Mia Wasikowska, the young Australian playing Alice seems stifled by the English accent imposed on her. She looks the part but her delivery is so stilted you just want her to get on with it. Any internal struggle is totally lost in the delivery and half the time she doesn’t seem to know what to do. When you start to lose interest in your central character, you’d better have some other characters to fall back on. But Tim Burton has gone for the safe option once again casting Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, and his wife Helena Bonham-Carter as the Red Queen.

Depp’s involvement has led to the Mad Hatter being elevated to a central character, but I couldn’t have cared less for him. His accent veers from English to Scottish without rhyme or reason, and his eccentricity begins to grate instantly. Don’t even start me on the dancing scene… What were they thinking? Bonham-Carter is fine as the Red Queen, but is upstaged by a much more nuanced performance by Anne Hathaway as the White Queen. If Burton weren’t stuck in such a creative rut he’d have realised that there would have been a much more interesting film to be made with Hathaway as the Red Queen.

Talking of creative rut, the score is done by long-time Burton collaborator Danny Elfman meaning that the soundtrack just sounds like they’ve asked for them to make it sound Tim Burton-esque. Boring. The most annoying aspect for me though was the over-reliance on CGI. Bad CGI has always been a bug-bear for me, and the mere hint of it can sour my view of a movie irreparably. Burton has a strong tradition of creating fantastical and macabre situations out of the ordinary – see Edward Scissorhands or Batman, but in Alice he practically uses it as a creative crutch. To be fair to him used sparingly, as in the Red Queen’s enlarged head, it looks great, but for some inexplicable reason, one of the main characters played by Crispin Glover has a full CGI body but a real head. His head looks unattached to his clearly digitized and extended body. Every time he came on screen I was asking myself why? There also close ups of horses, and instead of using a real horse, they CGI one in? A horse and a human body? Just use the real thing… GAH.

The original book is a classic children’s whimsical fantasy, full of eccentric English humour, but all this been abandoned in favour of quirky/annoying characters and situations a with a wholly unnecessary Narnia-esque battle scene tacked onto the end. The plot is fairly incomprehensible and moves forward without any real explanation of who wants what and for what reason. The film has a few saving graces that make it nearly bearable – Matt Lucas as Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle_dum, Stephen Fry’s Cheshire Cat, and some moments of genuine invention (Alice hopping the moat of giant floating heads), but otherwise I found it all fairly irritating. Nice 3D though.

2/5

Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland is the low-point of a once-great directors nadir of output. He needs to do something else… something different, preferably without Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham-Carter and Danny Elfman. Let’s see something more personal like Ed Wood please.