{"id":8883,"date":"2010-04-09T17:48:56","date_gmt":"2010-04-10T01:48:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=8883"},"modified":"2010-04-10T06:07:43","modified_gmt":"2010-04-10T14:07:43","slug":"alice-in-wonderland-tim-burton-2010-usa-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=8883","title":{"rendered":"Alice In Wonderland (Tim Burton, 2010): USA"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Richard Feilden<\/a>. Viewed at Century Stadium 25, Orange County.<\/p>\n

\"\"I have fallen down the rabbit hole.\u00a0 Potions don\u2019t shrink me, nor do cats talk.\u00a0 But something has happened that, if not impossible, never struck me as probable.\u00a0 Tim Burton has made a boring film.\u00a0 A dull film.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A dreary, tiresome, lack-luster film.\u00a0 How on earth did that happen?<\/p>\n

Burton\u2019s Alice In Wonderland<\/a> <\/em>is a mish-mash of both its namesake and Through the Looking Glass<\/span>, with additional material from screenwriter Linda Woolverton.\u00a0 Alice (Mia Wasikowska), now 19, has forgotten about her childhood adventures.\u00a0 Destined for an arranged marriage, she runs away from a garden party and, as luck would have it, falls straight down a rabbit hole.\u00a0 Even there her fate seems out of her hands, as Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) and Dormouse (Barbara Windsor) drag her into a war against the tyrannical Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter)<\/p>\n

Alice Can’t Have Its Cake and Eat it Too<\/strong><\/p>\n

Things get off to a strong start, with the highly independent Alice trying to make her own way in a world in which the future has been planned out for her.\u00a0 But the film trips up with her as she takes the plunge into Wonderland, and the problem seems to be Burton.\u00a0 The film has his footprints all over it, but the man himself is missing.\u00a0 We have Depp and Bonham Carter bringing the wacky we\u2019ve come to expect, twisted landscapes, haunting forests and gloomy environments.\u00a0 But all of the actual darkness and humor that Burton usually brings is missing.\u00a0 Where Sleepy Hollow<\/em>\u2019s headless horseman brought a sense of fear and danger with his decapitation spree, the Red Queen is neutered.\u00a0 No matter how many times we hear her bark out an order for someone to lose their head, no one\u2019s neck ever feels the sting of the executioner\u2019s axe.\u00a0 Sure, there\u2019s a moat-full of floating craniums, but they look as though they belong to statues and besides, we don\u2019t know any of their owners.\u00a0 The film lacks scares, suspense and any sense of threat, and thus the audience has no reason to care.<\/p>\n

If you wish to argue that this is a \u2018children\u2019s film\u2019, and thus shouldn\u2019t be too<\/em> scary (though that didn\u2019t stop Burton when directing BeetleJuice<\/em> or producing The Nightmare Before Christmas<\/em>), then fair enough. \u00a0But what then has happened to the characters?\u00a0 In particular, Depp\u2019s Hatter has truly embraced madness, to the point where he is now actually schizophrenic.\u00a0 His accent lurches between firey Scottish and a lisping version of his own voice, both with personalities to match. \u00a0\u00a0This renders him highly disturbing, and makes the suddenly close relationship which springs up between Hatter and Alice all the more unbelievable.\u00a0 The audience is given no emotional bedrock to cling to.\u00a0 Burton is also determined to cram in as many characters from the two books as possible, such as the March Hare (Paul Whitehouse), Tweedledum and Tweedledee (Matt Lucas), Jabberwocky (Christopher Lee) and the Dodo Bird (Michael Gough).\u00a0 This leaves too little room to get to know them, and they drift in and out of the story without ever feeling part of it.<\/p>\n

On the plus side, the voice-cast assembled is spectacular, and many of the performances are superb.\u00a0 Stephen Fry\u2019s voice oozes from the ever grinning mouth of the Cheshire Cat like rancid corn-syrup and Christopher Lee, though woefully underused, brings his usual gravitas to the giant Jabberwocky.\u00a0 Wasikowska acquits herself admirably amongst the more experienced cast that (virtually) surrounds her, conjuring up a very straightforward Alice who brooks no nonsense, even when her world has been turned upside down.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, that inverted world is another problem.\u00a0 Wonderland is a computer generated world.\u00a0 This should have allowed Burton\u2019s usually hyper-active imagination to run free, conjuring up the wild and fantastic, a realm of dream and nightmare.\u00a0 Instead we have a few giant toadstools, a couple of castles and a lot of empty space.\u00a0 Wonderland under Red Queen\u2019s rule is not the exciting, twisted world you expect from Burton.\u00a0 Rather it is desolate, lifeless and, well, boring.\u00a0 Nowhere is this more keenly felt than in the final battle sequence of the film where, mixing the first and second books in a rather odd manner. \u00a0In a succession of long shots monochrome armies clash on a monochrome battlefield, creating what may be the dullest war ever fought on screen.\u00a0 The visuals, if nowhere else, are where I expect Burton\u2019s creations to shine and to find them so insipid is truly disappointing.<\/p>\n

Another problem with the film\u2019s visuals comes from the choice to mix live action and computer generated material on the same screen.\u00a0 Here the film runs headlong into one of the (many) problems that I had with Avatar<\/em>.\u00a0 No matter how convincing the CGI worlds are, introducing a real person into them simply highlights their flaws.\u00a0 The closer the environments come to appearing real, the less convincing they become when a real person is involved.\u00a0 While Avatar managed to avoid this problem for most of the film by keeping the humans and the Na-vi separated, Alice is on screen, and therefore out of place, for the majority of this film\u2019s running time.\u00a0 I confess that I did not see the film in 3D, as until someone convinces me that they have found a way to use it to actually enhance the story telling process you\u2019ll be prying the extra dollars from my cold dead fingers.\u00a0 However at no point did it feel as though a retro-fitted illusion of depth (the film was created as a 2D experience) would have improved things.<\/p>\n

The film is also cursed with a cock-eyed message about self-determination (compare Alice\u2019s decisions in Wonderland with those she makes back in the real world), and its few laughs are mostly to be found in its trailer.\u00a0 With not enough Tim Burton here to make the film interesting, but too much for the film to be a cute children\u2019s story, Alice in Wonderland<\/em> digs itself into a hole it just can\u2019t climb out of.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Richard Feilden. Viewed at Century Stadium 25, Orange County. I have fallen down the rabbit hole.\u00a0 Potions don\u2019t shrink me, nor do cats talk.\u00a0 But something has happened that, if not impossible, never struck me as probable.\u00a0 Tim Burton has made a boring film.\u00a0 A dull film.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A dreary, tiresome, lack-luster film.\u00a0 How […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8883\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}