And so the stage was set: take my favourite animated film of all time and put it in the hands of someone with the visual imagination of Tim Burton and hey presto a brilliant re-imagining of a classic children's story should result. Surely Alice in Wonderland was going to be one of the highlights of 2010 despite the decision to show it in 3D? Well no, not exactly. The trouble is, is that Tim Burton just isn't very good. Granted I've seen only a handful of his works but so far none of them have received anything more than half marks. Edward Scissorhands is probably the best I've seen so far. Visually quite interesting but ultimately unspectacular. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was just a little bit too glossy for my liking and Burton's vision of Willy Wonka somewhat peculiar. Corpse Bride, distinctively average. Batman, again visually interesting, (more so than Christopher Nolan's acclaimed Dark Knight), but the story is, well, a bit of a mess.
Perhaps I've just not seen his best. Big Fish looks interesting. The word 'masterpiece' often gets aimed at Ed Wood and Sweeney Todd certainly has it's fans and everything looked perfectly set up here with Alice. I grant Burton his visual flair (although that doesn't make me a fan per se) and it seemed that it should perfectly match up with Carroll's classic novel, but sadly it doesn't. But what goes wrong?
Burton, according to the trusty source of Wikipedia, said this of his production of Alice in Wonderland: "new movie is to give the story "some framework of emotional grounding...to try and make Alice feel more like a story as opposed to a series of events." But this seems contrary to the reason that I especially loved the original Disney version. Is Burton not a fan? I loved the original precisely because Alice walks around the surreal world of Wonderland and engages with it's inhabitants for short periods of time. There isn't a 'story' as such in the 1951 but instead an adventure and adventures don't have to have beginnings, middles and ends.
The plot of Burton's version does share a lot of similarities with the version of Clyde Geronimi and co, more so in the first third than the rest of the film. Once again we meet Alice, except this time instead of lying on the banks of a river, she is a little older and about to wed the peculiar Hamish Ascot against her will. Eventually she follows a White Rabbit and falls down a hole, before engaging in the familiar activities of eating 'Eat Me' cake and drinking 'Drink Me' liquid. If only the key fit a normal sized door eh? Eventually Alice is just the right size to fit through the tiny door and once again she finds her self in Wonderland (or 'Underland in fact, as Burton chooses to coin it). We quickly meet familiar characters: Tweedledee and Tweedledum (Matt Lucas), the Caterpillar (Alan Rickman), the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry) and eventually the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp). And abruptly this is where the familiarities stop
.
Alice eventually gets embroiled in story with an all too familiar arc, that ends up suffering from a syndrome that many modern day multiplex films suffer from: Third Act Syndrome. What makes Alice in Wonderland even more insufferable is that it suffers from it as soon as Alice steps foot in Wonderland. The story immediately because a generic action-adventure and exploring Wonderland's fantastic landscape is never on Burton's mind. Those moments in the film that we do get to stop and look at the surroundings didn't please me but disappointed me. Even getting on board Robert Stromberg of Avatar fame couldn't help to make the film visually appealing and looking at the Wonderland surrounding the Mad Hatter's tea party looks like a scene from John Hillcoat's gloomy post-apocalyptic film The Road. Now that's not exciting is it?
Some characters get more screentime than others but the choice is a bad one. Depp disappointed me as the Mad Hatter. Don't get me wrong, Depp is magnificently talented but I think the character of the Mad Hatter is written wrong here, again the fault of Burton. Helena Bonham Carter (who obviously had to be in this didn't she?) gives a pretty annoying, noisy performances as the Red Queen. Mia Wasikowska is adequate as Alice but the only noteworthy performance is Alan Rickman's voice work of the Caterpillar but sadly he is given less than five minutes screentime I'd say.
And so we come to the third act. By this time we are really meant to care about the outcome remember? But here we don't. It involves a standard, over-long, dull, battle scene that would be just as suited to Robin Hood or Clash of the Titans or District 9 and so on, which involves Alice having to slay some big Jabberwocky. Lovely. Not. It's generic and it's mind-numbing and it sums up mainstream cinema in the 21st century.
Vulgarization doesn't even come close to explaining what Tim Burton has done to Lewis Carroll's and Disney's classic story. Every choice he makes is the wrong one, and although the script is occasionally humorous and some performances are decent I'm sorry to say it's a disaster pretty much from the word go.
(I fail to mention that I actually saw this in 2D. Alice in Wonderland 3D, now that really would give me to something to moan about.)
Rating: 2/10
No comments:
Post a Comment