Alice in Wonderland

Before I begin my usual tyraid into what's wrong with the world I thought I'd just clear something up. I've never actually read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or Through The Looking-Glass and so I'm sorry to all you puritans out there who will no doubt find my review ill informed and intolerable. BUT what I figure is that any decent movie adaptation deserves to be treated as its own work. Actually bad ones do too but that's beside the point.

Anyway so a couple of months back I was shown the trailer to Tim Burton's upcoming Alice in Wonderland movie and I got excited. But excitement can be bittersweet mistress, especially when she wants a threesome with her ugly sister disappoinment. And that's exacltly what Alice in Wonderland was, a Ménage à Troi with high expectations and inadequet payoff. Now because I'm cynical I tend to not get too excited about a lot of things for fear of having my soul crushed, but this was Tim Burton doing Alice in Wonderland with his usual superstar tag team of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. It had all the ingredients and skills at hand to be a delicious 3 course meal of enjoyment. But instead what we got was more like a teacake. It was good, but I was hungry for more. So what was wrong? Let us dive right in.

The movie starts off in the real world during the "bonnet drama" era. Alice is a lively, free spirited sort of gal feeling all the pressures of a sexist and elitest society. The movie follows Alice around for 15 minutes or so as she interacts with various characters who you just know are going to have themselves injected into the wonderland world as a fantasy persona. Yeah, that's right. It seems that the movie industry has imposed some kind of law in which if a movie starts off in the real world and then goes into a fantasy world then the fantasy world MUST be reflective of the real world and how the main character views it. So instead of a genuine fantasy world most of the time what we're really getting isa creative visualization of the thought process and of personal growth and discovery. Which I guess is fine but why can't I just go to a freaking weirdo place just because it's there anymore? Now it's all dreams and ambitions and fears and shit and it's all getting a bit pretentious and lame to be honest. Anyway so then Alice follows the rabbit down the hole and the adventure begins.

Now what I remember Wonderland (or Underland in this movie) to be like is in many ways very different to what the movie presents. I acknowledge that maybe I'm the only one who thinks this but to me Wonderland was always a place where random, inexplicable shit was constantly screwing Alice over and fucking with her mind. Alice was a fish that was so far out of water that she was in fucking space and gasping for air. In the movie she's the fucking chosen one. Instead of being a fish out of water she's a champion of the people. Instead of stumbling from one oddball character to another they all get together and discuss the current political climate. I mean even the Mad Hatter is saned up so that he can step in as something of a role model to Alice. I mean the world is still nice; it looks great and there are still hints of insanity and such but it's not the same. It feels more like Middle Earth has been redone on magic mushrooms or acid. It might sound fun but it's just not the same. So anyway shit in Wonderland gets sorted, Alice returns to the real world on a hero buzz and gives a big fuck you to the real world in the form of a dance she picked up from the Mad Hatter. A dance that made me die a little inside.

So what does all this mean in terms of quality? To me Alice in Wonderland was ok. It wasn't bad. But it wasn't great either and quite frankly it stands as a low point in Tim Burton's career. I suppose it had to happen eventually. Nobody can just keep making awsome stuff over and over again, can they?