Tim Burton must have felt like the rabbit in the story, because it looked like he was in a hurry to finish the story in the shortest amount of time possible.

It’s not that the screenplay wasn’t going anywhere. It went from point (A): “Alice (Mia Wasikowska) falls down the rabbit hole” to point (B): “Alice fights in a battle against the evil queen”. What happened between those two points was really confusing.

The characters, just like the screenplay, kept zig-zagging from one end of Wonderland to another.

The producers probably insisted on keeping the movie under a 2 hour duration.

Lewis Caroll’s Wonderland is a heterogeneous world filled with a multitude of eccentric characters. Within this complex environment, fitting a story in a short time frame (1h48mins to be exact) can be a perilous endeavor.

The screenwriter attempted to stuff the story with as many Wonderland creatures as possible, sometimes without a purpose. The dodo character, for instance, didn’t have much of a part besides questioning whether this is the real Alice following her arrival to Wonderland.

It takes some time for an audience to empathize with movie characters. Personally, I didn’t care much for any of them. There’s a segment in the film where the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) tells the story of all the bad things that happened in Wonderland while Alice was gone. There was nothing emotional about his story. It had zero impact on me.

Throughout the film, Alice kept wondering whether she was in a dream or not. That should have been left for the audience to figure out. For the third time Alice asks that question to a fellow character, it is truly becoming annoying.

Some people have criticized Johnny Depp for taking the role of another wacky character. This is ridiculous. If Johnny’s enjoying this and is good at it, I say let Johnny play all the loony characters to his liking.

All actors offer a fairly good performance, which is quite an achievement when you consider the screenplay they had to deal with. The most difficult character to play must have been Alice, because the evolution of her character through the story is not too clear. Congratulations to Miss Wasikowska for keeping her cool and delivering a steady performance.

Mia Wasikowska plays Alice

The design of the characters was very interesting. I especially liked the Cheschire cat. The coolest cat to star in a movie since Puss’n boots.

The 3-D effects were ok, but nothing to knock you out of your seat. Like I mentioned in a previous post, Avatar sets the bar pretty high for 3-D effects, so future comparisons are likely to be disappointing.

Alice in Wonderland is a bland movie that doesn’t hold well together. However, I didn’t regret watching it, because a movie set in Wonderland is like pizza. Even when it’s bad, you’ll always find something good about it. I suggest you rent the movie once, but don’t set your expectations too high.

All that was missing were the odours and the mosquito bites.

Avatar is a masterpiece. I can’t remember the last time I felt like this after watching a movie. That time was probably after watching Star Wars for the first time, and that was a long, long time ago.

Avatar made such an impression on me that I had to catch my breath at the end of the movie.

Set in the year 2154, the story takes place on the planet Pandora, where a human colony is attempting to harvest precious metal ressources worth billions of dollars. The mining company encounters a few glitches. The planet is already inhabited by blue humanoids called the Na’vis, who are living in close harmony with their environment, and want to keep it that way. Furthermore, the planet’s atmosphere is toxic to human beings, such that a breath of fresh air on Pandora will have you dead in less than four minutes. In order to improve their knowledge of the Na’vis and their biology, a team of scientists has developed a program in which Na’vi bodies are grown using human DNA. These bodies, referred to as avatars, are controlled from a distance by human beings who are genetically and telepathically linked to the avatars. The main protagonist of the story, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), is an ex-Marine who is now paraplegic. Jake is hired to fill in the shoes (more specifically, the avatar body) of his twin brother who has been murdered while operating the avatar on Pandora.

The message behind the story is what moved me the most. As an avatar, Jake is eventually accepted by the Na’vis and gets introduced to their way of living and philosophy. The Na’vis connect themselves with their surrounding environment, and not only literally. Their beliefs are reminiscent of human philosophies where the respect of nature is of primary importance. For instance, there is a scene in the movie where a Na’vi has to kill an animal for protection, and then asks for forgiveness. Likewise, during a hunt, Native Americans used to make a prayer right after the killing of an animal, praying for its soul and thanking the animal for its sacrifice. Concepts of nature’s energy flowing through us, of humans being an integral part of Nature, rather than a distinct entity, are themes that can also be found in Hinduism, for instance. These messages are gradually carried throughout the movie, and not in a preachy way.

James Cameron (Aliens, Titanic) and his special-effects team managed to create a fantastic world full of life and colours; that’s something I especially appreciated on a grey winter day. The 3-D effect makes you feel like you were there, wandering through the plants and animals which inhabit the jungle of Pandora. All that was missing were the odours and the mosquito bites.

The action scenes in Avatar are quite spectacular, and they are plenty. You will experience virtual rides in many different ways.

It might sound strange to say, but those ecology lessons have a greater impact when they’re being taught by another species, even a fictitious one. Imagine if polar bears were suddenly able to talk: it would put a whole different perspective on the global warming debate! Let’s hope that the Na’vis philosophy will eventually percolate through our collective mind.

It was refreshing to see a movie where special effects serve the story, and not the other way around. To truly appreciate the movie, you need to go to the movie theater; if you don’t like crowds, I suggest you go to the 11:00 pm screening on a monday night.

I’ve never had a better 3-D experience in a movie theater. Future 3-D performance-capture movies will be compared to Avatar, and this one sets the bar very high (sorry, Alice). Avatar is a great movie to start the new year and take some time off from that cold winter and dragging recession.

Did we really need another helping of the classic Dickens story from Hollywood? The answer is an enthusiastic yes! Disney’s version of A Christmas Carol exceeded my expectations by a long shot.

What I anticipated to be another family-friendly Christmas flick is in fact a thrilling ghost movie, to the point that I actually jumped in my seat a few times during the screening.

You can take your kids to see it but I would definitely not call this a kiddie movie.

We all know the story by heart, but here’s a quick recap anyway: in 1843 London, Ebenezer Scrooge is an old, stingy businessman who has no interest in partying or helping those in need (two things the rest of us normally do around Christmas time). On Christmas eve, Scrooge receives the visit of his associate, Jacob Marley, who doesn’t look nor sound too good, which is kind of normal since the guy’s already been dead for seven years. Marley pledges Scrooge to change his ways and announces the arrival of three ghosts who will visit Scrooge over the course of the night: a ghost of Christmas past, a ghost of Christmas present, and a ghost of Christmas future. With each ghost, Scrooge undergoes an express form of shock psychotherapy which proves to be quite effective by the end of the night.

Accordingly, the movie featured a number of ghost characters, both principal and secondary. At times it felt like a commercial for the Haunted Mansion at DisneyWorld. The ghosts were very well designed. I especially liked the ghosts of Christmas past and Jacob Marley. In Dickens’ book, it’s not clear what the ghost of Christmas past is supposed to look like; therefore the art directors had to come up with their own version of the character. The ghost of Christmas past looked like a cute, creepy version of Lumière, the candle guy from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. He was a cool character to listen to, even though he had a minor speech deficiency. Marley’s ghost, on the other hand, looked like he had paid a visit to Medusa‘s hairdresser. I found him quite scary-looking.

Shot with performance capture, the movie sits midway between a cartoon and a real life action picture.  The 3-D effects were nice, but I didn’t find them essential to the visual atmosphere of the movie, except for the flying scenes. Those were quite exhilarating. The setting of London in the 1840s was very well recreated. In his book, Dickens wanted to depict the extreme poverty that was affecting a great number of Londoners at the time and the movie did show that it was not the most pleasant time to be living in.

Jim Carrey does a fine impersonation of Ebenezer Scrooge, along with Gary Oldman who impersonates a number of characters, the most striking being Marley’s ghost.

Alan Silvestri wrote the score for the film; I liked the way he took on Christmas classics and mixed them with his own compositions.

The storyline flows smoothly through the movie, except for a chase scene that I found overstretched towards the end of the movie, when the ghost of Christmas Past is trying to catch Scrooge.

Robert Zemeckis, who also directed The Polar Express, has a blast making those performance-capture movies, and it shows. He injected a lot of creativity into this film. It is not the kind of animated production you would normally expect from Disney studios, and I’m pretty sure that the producers have let Zemeckis build the movie according to his own vision. It is a refreshing version of an old Christmas classic that will eventually become a classic in its own right.