140 Character Movie Review – #140RVW
The 2001 version of Planet of the Apes ensures that nothing else can ever be called Tim Burton’s worst movie, but this sure does its best…
Spoiler-free Movie Review of Alice in Wonderland:
Where do you want to start with this one? The 3D conversion, the disturbing art direction, the overdone cg, the serious tone, the efforts to turn this into an epic battle picture?
I’ve come up with a term for movies made post Lord of the Rings (LOTR) that needlessly and without good reason inject large-scale battle sequences with tons of CG combatants; such films are trying to win the LOTRy. I know, terrible joke – but I needed something to describe this rampant phenomenon. It’s really out of hand – movies are adding massive battles that are supposed to impress with their scope, when in actuality they just numb you with unreal looking scenes of seemingly endless armies of CG characters, which require you to care about none of them. It just ends up being an expensive and time consuming sequence with no actual importance to the picture. Worse yet, these scenes are usually supposed to be the climax of the film. Alice in Wonderland isn’t the worst example of this phenomenon, by far, but it may be the most inexcusable, since it is so completely out of place in this story.
The whole picture is an exercise in CG run amuck. Not only is virtually every character and location digitally realized – there’s not a single practical effect in sight – Burton uses CG to wildly distort even the human characters. I may never forgive the man for the gross enlargement of Helena Bonham Carter’s head. He even manages to make Crispin Glover look more creepy than usual, no small feat.
I simply cannot fathom what was going through the filmmaker’s heads when they decided on this art direction. It’s mental. Hideously ugly and intentionally bizarre, seemingly just for the sake of being “weird”. They also chose to give the characters full names, each more absurd than the one before. Even the cake has a name…
Depp is a nightmare. The character design is dreadful, the characterization more so, and the decision to make the Mad Hatter a main character is worst of all. Never hire stars before planning a script – you end up writing the role to the level of star appeal instead of the other way around. I get the idea of the mercury poisoning being the reason for his madness and that’s why he looks like that; it’s an interesting idea, but ultimately unnecessary. After all, everyone else in the world is mad, so why does he need a special story? And what’s with the whole Glaswegian accent?
The whole story of Alice returning to Underland is frankly a mess and unnecessarily complicated. The serious storyline of a fractured world torn apart by warring monarchs – ridiculous. Worse, it strips all of the fun from the thing. Shouldn’t a story set in this world be more enjoyable? The filmmakers envisioned this not as a reimagining and not as a sequel, but something else entirely. And it’s something else, alright…
But it’s not all bad, which is why this review is written more out of frustration than dislike. Mia Wasikowska is absolutely lovely and near perfect casting. She is very charismatic and works even with the parts of the story which pose her as a warrior, even if she’s frankly more interesting in London than in Underland.
The movie is at its best at the outset, when it places Alice against the backdrop of high society, where the people are even more bizarre than any creature she will encounter in the next 100 minutes. The nods to Wonderland characters depicted in London society is a great tip of the hat and gives the thing a Wizard of Oz dreamlike quality.
The other time that the movie really frustrates you by showing the potential is when they show some flashbacks to Alice’s previous visit as a child – this is the movie they should have made.
Finally, one spoiler-filled thought – what is up with the ending? I love that Alice has become a confident young woman not content with the life her society has carved out for her, but it’s ruined a bit when you realize that she has decided to head off to China as a colonial trader. That’s disturbing. Will the sequel find Alice exporting opium?
I find it extremely hard to believe that this is Burton’s most successful picture, which really only highlights the folly of judging movie success on dollars alone. These metrics should always have been based on ticket sales, not receipts, otherwise what’s the point? (In fact, adjusted for inflation, Batman was a much bigger success.)
Burton the great adapter is a bad role for someone so talented and creative. He has always been at his best with material he wrote or helped to develop. Alice in Wonderland is a supremely frustrating film and a missed opportunity. The only rousing success of the picture is the score by Danny Elfman, which is beautiful and haunting in that Elfman way.
Poster:
Trailer:
http://youtu.be/ilqTywuUon8
Bechdel Test:
Pass
The Representation Test Score: B (7 pts)
(http://therepresentationproject.org/grading-hollywood-the-representation-test/)
| Main Cast | Mia Wasikowska Alice Kingsleigh, Johnny Depp Mad Hatter, Helena Bonham Carter Red Queen, Anne Hathaway White Queen |
| Rating | PG |
| Release Date | Fri 05 Mar 2010 UTC |
| Director | Tim Burton |
| Genres | Adventure, Family, Fantasy |
| Plot | Nineteen-year-old Alice returns to the magical world from her childhood adventure, where she reunites with her old friends and learns of her true destiny: to end the Red Queen’s reign of terror. |
| Poster |  |
| Runtime | 108 |
| Tagline | You’re invited to a very important date 3/5/10 |
| Writers | Linda Woolverton (screenplay), Lewis Carroll (books) |
| Year | 2010 |
