Alice in Wonderland: A Movie Review

No matter how much you want to like this movie, you’re going to be disappointed. Like everyone else, I had high expectations for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. They were not met.

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.