As a filmmaker who specialises in conjuring up things dark and weird, one would think that Tim Burton would feel right at home in Wonderland. Unfortunately, the latest film to plunge down the rabbit-hole falls flat on its backside and can’t get back on its feet.
Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is all grown up – and, as the film goes to great pains to establish, she is bored with prim and proper 19th-century London society. She has no interest in corsets or unexpected marriage proposals and is unhealthily pale in the tradition of great Tim Burton characters. At her own surprise engagement party, Alice is distracted by the appearance of a waistcoated rabbit, gesturing at his fobwatch as if he too is wondering when something interesting is going to happen.
Of course, Alice soon tumbles into somewhere out of her dreams – or possibly her nightmares – known not as Wonderland but Underland. Underland’s peculiar residents speak in hushed tones about the prophesied day when a girl named Alice will defeat the beastly Jabberwocky (voiced, sort of, by Christopher Lee) and save Underland from the terrible rule of the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter). As if suddenly being six inches tall in a strange place and being terrorised by something called a Bandersnatch wasn’t enough for Alice to worry about.
There’s no shortage of great roles to go round in Wonderland/Underland, and there’s no denying that an exceptional cast has been assembled here. Bonham Carter is a terrific Red Queen (the Queen of Hearts by another name) – the fact she’s smug about her ridiculous swollen head is a nice touch – but it’s impossible to take her seriously as a villain by the time the film wants us to. Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter is probably the most inspired creation, terrifyingly unhinged where most other Hatters have settled for being merely goofy, but even Depp seems robbed of his chance to shine. Anne Hathaway is the surprise stand-out as the White Queen, gliding through her scenes with dignity intact.
Then there’s Matt Lucas as doughy twins Tweedledee and Tweedledum (doing his best with effectively only his eyes and mouth to perform with), Stephen Fry as the ever-evaporating Cheshire Cat, Timothy Spall as Bayard the bloodhound, Alan Rickman as Absolem the chain-smoking blue caterpillar, an elongated Crispin Glover as the Knave of Hearts (with the stilted movements of something out of
Jason and the Argonauts, betraying the signs of some eleventh-hour animation work) and Michael Sheen as the White Rabbit. Sure, it sounds promising on paper, but one begins to suspect that screenwriter Linda Woolverton doesn’t know what to do with them all. Like so many other incarnations of the Alice story,
Alice in Wonderland is little more than a procession of mad characters in want of a story to cling to. The character design is fantastic, but this highlights the weakness of Wonderland itself – scarce little sign of Burton’s personal visual style here.
Which brings us to Alice. We’ve come to think of it as a classic, but Disney’s 1951
Alice in Wonderland wasn’t particularly well-received, and Walt Disney himself figured that audiences couldn’t relate to the character of Alice. She’s a passive observer, not your typical heroine – lamely remarking “Curiouser and curiouser!” in each weird scenario or sitting down to have a good cry when things get too tough. Burton promised to address this very problem in his new version – but Alice’s plainness as a character is still the biggest problem here, only now it’s coated with a glorious CGI sheen. Sadly, Woolverton’s script leaves Wasikowska very little to do. Dressing her in a suit of armour for a climactic battle sequence nicked from a Narnia film (there’s even a sword-wielding rodent) does little to disguise the fact.
Further to that, the film’s concerted attempt to pass off Alice’s time in Underland as a quest, from which she returns to the real world with newfound wisdom, is utterly unconvincing. Even the Duchess, the character from the original Alice books who could find a moral in anything, would be baffled by this chain of events and this silly, tacked-on conclusion. Inflicting an Avril Lavigne number on the audience at the closing credits (one senses the presence of Disney here) adds insult to injury. Hidden somewhere behind the pretty publicity images and monster hype campaign there’s a gaping rabbit-hole where the good movie was supposed to be.
Alice in Wonderland opens in cinemas on Thursday, March 4.
You can view the Alice in Wonderland movie trailer here on TheVine.