Alice in Wonderland - fail!
March 17th 2010 04:02
It begins with the typical scene of Alice falling down a hole where she is presented with the ‘drink me’ ‘eat me’ scenario and a tiny door. She gets confused, leaving the key behind on a table out of reach. A voice whispers ‘you’d think she’d remember from the first time’. And it’s right- why doesn’t she remember? The audience is instantly disappointed to realise that she doesn’t remember anything. Upon entering the world, she doesn’t seem to remember any of the characters. You’d expect her to embrace them with open arms and show in more depth what they had been up to in the last decade she had been away and what happened to the once cheery scene which has turned to darkness, but she continues to reject the world she is in as just a dream, and despite dreaming about the characters her whole life has no connection with them. Even they don’t know if she’s the real deal – the real ‘Alice’. There is also that annoying lack of consistency over her dress size. She keeps shrinking and growing throughout the film and sometimes she needs a new dress and other times the dress grows or shrinks with her.
Despite some big names the characters performances were poor. Anne Hathaway playing the white queen looked awkward and unnatural with her hands poised in the air and seemed to make a joke out of her icy character, it wasn’t hard to see through the white hair to her Devil Wears Prada character. Her performance made me cringe. While, take away the over applied stage makeup and wig on The Mad Hatter played by Johnny Depp and he didn’t go the full way, I would have liked to see more madness. Thank god for the Red Queen, keeping everything alive... just.
A lover of the original Alice in Wonderland, this movie had absolutely no substance for me and may as well have been called Narnia. Instead of characters being turned into stone and put outside the castle, their heads were cut off and thrown into a moat. Instead of the fawn creature, helping the kids through their journey in Narnia, Alice had the Mad Hatter. The film felt like Narnia and even looked like Narnia, but Narnia was better (despite the fat kid who loved Turkish delights not being fat – my biggest disappointment).
From the start the audience knew what was going to happen and as the film went on it became even more predictable - you find yourself begging for a twist - please make it the white queen who slays the jaberwocky!! Nope. It's Alice.. as predicted. At the start she's shown a scroll with her fighting the creature and at the end she prevails in fighting the creature - yawn. Her friends get captured along the way - she frees them and goes back to her normal world. Tim Burton in my opinion failed to capture the magic that once, was Alice in Wonderland in a drab, effortless attempt at recreation. He obviously just wanted to make a quick buck.
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