Review: Alice In Wonderland

Ugh.

Alice in Wonderland is a loathsome, boring, awful movie. I hated it. I hated the attention I gave it. I hated all but one of the characters. I hated the visuals. I hated the set up and I hated the follow through. I dearly hated the ending. I hated the music that came after the ending. I hated this movie, not because it does many things terribly wrong, but bcause it does nothing. It means nothing. It feels and thinks nothing. It is pointless.

Let me explain, properly:

Alice is, at first, a little girl who dreams about talking rabbits and such. Her father is totally cool with this - he sometimes believes six impossible things before breakfast.

Next, Alice is 19 or something, and is caught in the classic bind of un-desired wed-lock to a sniveling, dork who, like every in-descript, cardboard creature surrounding Alice, just wants her to be normal. This might be interesting if she seemed in any way abnormal, or if the abnormality she possessed was in any way interesting or colorful, but neither is the case. She's just as much a hideous bore as everyone else. If anything, I disliked her more

If only it had been a well instead.

Then, Alice begins seeing the white rabbit. She eventually tares off from the proposal stage to follow after him. This is, of course, supposed to represent some kind of introspective retreat, a release into madness to evade the rigors of reality. I don't care. Things are not interesting simply because they represent other things. Wonderland is not important just because it may represent the depths of Alice's mind. Why would I care abut her mind in the first place?

So Alice falls down the rabbit hole and lots of CG happens. She spends a good 35 minutes going through the cake/potion/key thing, even though everyone remembers exactly how it goes. Why should it spend so much time on this if it has nothing new to say and nothing interesting to show us? Alice shrinks and grows and the effects are good but the effects are not enough. We know that CG artists can make people shrink and grow. It's not a surprise or a spectacle. It's what the movie must do despite not caring about it at all.

Then the Wonderland plot gets underway. Honestly, ya got me. The Red Queen (or Heart Queen or Queen of Hearts or whatever) is bad, and the Mad Hatter and...uh...the one rabbit and the little talking mouse and this talking dog are good, and, well, you know. That's got to be reconciled. Luckily, they've got Alice, prophesized by a scroll to be the chosen one (or champion or savior or whatever). I want to know: what kind of person follows this development and is actually concerned for the return of Wonderland to normal? Isn't the whole point that there is no normal? Isn't that the fun?

And somewhere in there, Alan Rickman voices the catepiller, just because Alan Rickman should voice the Catepiller. 

Helena Bonham Carter does, however, a terrific job projecting her Queen character. She is actually fun. I don't want her to lose; she's the only good thing Wonderland seems to have going for it. Depp's hater was supposed to embody this, but he doesn't, because he's not a character. He is a pair of accents and a stupid get up. When he's happy he's English and when he's angry he becomes Scottish. Are these the temperaments the accents imply? How are we supposed to grasp a character who already has nothing to stand on, when he spends an equal amount of time in a pair of tangent moods? Why should his version of Wonderland matter to me at all?

Most of all, who gave this guy a sword?

It ends in a battle scene. It is the most boring battle scene I've ever seen in a movie (just prior to this we learn that the White Queen and the Heart Queen are sisters, which matters a lot and makes a big difference). I know the argument against the inorganic, cheap feeling of CG environments is an old one, but it was derived of films like this, in which everything you're looking at is digital and ugly and meaningless. There are odd moments when it's fun - when we're flying through it, for instance, but otherwise its a total mess, and no more impressive as a purple bush than it is as a battle scene or a fire breathing dragon. 

Look at that environment and tell me its not a mess.

In the end Alice wins and goes back to reality (which is, I noted, immediately more appealing and pretty than the world we'd spent the movie in). She goes back to the proposal scene (where I guess no time has passed) and puts everybody in their place. Would it be too much for Alice to have learned something critical about herself? Shouldn't she have? Is her catharsis really that everyone else needs to live up to her expectations? Really? After all that I actually get to hate this character more than I did in the first place? And the feet thing...Oh with the feet thing.

This movie does, however, help to realize that I am not yet capable of writing about truly terrible movies; I've gone on far too long and don't feel I've properly explained it. It deserves better, this degree of rubbish. It deserves to be recognized. I've lost all respect for Tim Burton, especially. You started out a weird little man that didn't fit in but had an amazing vision. Now you fit fine; you're not awkward or misunderstood and you have nothing to say. That's fine, but please stop putting your name on things like it makes any difference.


By Dave Beauchene