Burtonified Alice: This rabbit hole is not as wondrous as Lewis Carroll’s!

Yet another random explosion of comments on the movie I saw yesterday! However, before my ricocheting mind lets go of all the thoughts, I have a confession to make. As a little girl, I was in love with Alice. There is certain timelessness in the story of a girl lost far away from home, trying to survive in a world full of quirky creatures and in the process finding her own self. Lost in the book, I would often feel like Alice and my imaginations flew faster than Carroll’s heroine fantasizing all the creatures of Wonderland to be as mysterious and magical as can be. When you go in to watch a movie with those kinds of humongous expectations, it is no surprise that you end up feeling disappointed. After all, it is not your childhood conjured up vision of Alice that you are going to be viewing, it is Tim Burton’s!

This movie represents another one in the long line of movies which is derived from rummaging through classic children’s literature and re-interpreted as a Gothic version by the director and shot through a grimmer, darker prism. Having said that, please don’t get the wrong impression here! It’s not a bad movie by any stretch of imagination. It is actually quite decent compared to 90% of the stuff churned out by Hollywood, but in the final analysis, it’s not the breath-taking, awe-inspiring, curl-your-toes film I wanted and expected from the Oscar-winning Director!

I think it is pointless to analyze the movie in terms of the adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic as it actually proceeds as a sequel of the tale we all know and love. Burton’s Alice is not a confused Victorian child of Carroll’s tale but a grown up 19 year old (played outstandingly with amazing grace and gravitas by Mia Wasikowska) who is more independent and sure of herself. She withstands the pressure to marry an aristocratic prig who doesn’t share her creative imagination and chooses to follow her heart..er..White Rabbit (voice of Michael Sheen) into a hole and into the Underland of her childhood dreams. It is here that the CG effects start coming at you thick and fast in quick succession and you barely find the time to assimilate, let alone like any of the quirky characters of the Underland. Among the famous array of characters Alice meets are the Tweedledee and Tweedledum (both played by Matt Lucas), Dormouse Mallymkun (voice of Barbara Windsor), Cheshire cat (voice of Stephen Fry), and a smoking Caterpiller (voice of Alan Rickman).

Alice eventually meets the crazy Mad Hatter who becomes her ally in the fight against the Red Queen so as to enable the White Queen to return to power in Underland. Mad Hatter has been played superbly by Johnny Depp, although he occasionally gives you a feeling of déjà vu with his character. I think it is time for Tim Burton and Johnny Depp to divorce each other so we as viewers can see a spark of freshness in their characters and films. Helena Bonham Carter was brilliant as the Queen of Hearts and stole the show from right under Depp’s nose. Her character’s Valentine lollipop look with a huge bulbous head was visually stunning and the cantankerous voice she used to terrorize her subjects was pitch perfect! Anne Hathaway as the White Queen was fairly competent.

The narrative of the movie is fairly linear and Burton has attempted to weave the disjointed events of the tale into some sort of a coherent sequential story. However, the more the plot line digressed from the original tale, the more flawed the movie appeared with the climax being the weakest and looking straight out of a Tolkien book. Although, to be fairly honest the final act of Alice fighting the Jabberwocky (voice by Christopher Lee) had quite a few kids at the edge of their seats.

Ultimately, I was disappointed. I expected Underland to be as-awesome-as and more-imaginative-than Pandora, but unfortunately all I got was gimmicky sequences of things flying onto my screen one after the other. It gave me a headache watching some of those scenes. This movie was originally shot for 2D and up-converted to 3D later, which resulted in the end product being more distracting than spectacular. Avatar really set the standard for filming movies in 3D with 3D cameras and is light years ahead of the curve!

However, I think at the end of the day, we need to remember who this massively hyped Disney movie is ultimately made for. If the barely concealed excitement and the chortled glees of a little princess sitting next to me were any indication, Tim Burton has once again hit the mark with this one!