Alice in Wonderland 2010 Movie Review
Though no-one could doubt director Tim Burton’s flair for eye-popping imagery, he sometimes seems less interested in telling compelling stories. Yet the first hour of his Alice in Wonderland, a 3-D adaptation — part animated, part live action — of Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books, offers both narrative thrust and giddy, exaggerated visuals. It rattles along beautifully.
Early on, a 19 year old Alice (Mia Wasikowska) sulkily rides in a carriage to a gathering at a stately home. It gradually dawns on her that this is her engagement party, and a foppish young lord publicly proposes.
Employing a modern idiom – “I need a moment” – she flees, pursuing into a thicket a white rabbit only she can see, and falls down a rabbit hole – at which point the film kicks into overdrive.
In quick succession, Alice, locked in a chamber, figures out that a potion on a table can make her huge or tiny. She makes her escape into a Gothic landscape and soon meets her major allies – a Mad Hatter, a March Hare, a Cheshire cat and a wise caterpillar.
We know from a prologue she first visited this place at age six, and thought it was called Wonderland. In fact, it’s Underland, and it holds more dangers and challenges than she knew.
Linda Woolverton (The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast) has fashioned screenplay that radically re-imagines Carroll’s stories, and targets the lucrative teen market.
Thus Alice is sceptical, serious-minded, with a frequent frown. Her wisecrack about the aristocracy’s decline hints at radical views. We learn she wears neither a corset nor stockings; combined with rejecting her suitor, this suggests a young woman liberated before her time.
In Underland, these tendencies are underlined. Alice repeats that this is her dream and she can do what she likes: her sense of self-determination makes Carroll’s Alice seem insipid.
Given how enjoyably Burton’s film proceeds, this matters little. Mia Wasikowska, so striking in the HBO series In Treatment, confirms herself as a hugely impressive actress.
The creatures inhabiting Underland are voiced delightfully: Matt Lucas as dim, muttering Tweedledum and Tweedledee, represented as two amusing animated versions of himself: fruity-toned Alan Rickman as the caterpillar and Stephen Fry sweetly urbane as the evaporating Cheshire Cat.
There are two undeniable star turns. First: Helena Bonham Carter, as the Red Queen – cruel, petulant and childish, bawling “Off with his head!” on the flimsiest pretext. Her own real head, massively oversized, perches atop a small computer-generated body. With this funny, outrageous turn, Bonham Carter approaches national treasure status.
Burton’s long-time muse Johnny Depp is ideal as the mercurial Mad Hatter; with his shock of horizontal red hair and manic gap-toothed grin, he switches moods (and accents) in rapid succession.
Yet after an hour the story stops dead and anticipates Alice’s climactic battle with the Jabberwock. Sadly, it’s derivative, straight from Lord of the Rings, as armour-clad Alice brandishes a sword beneath lowering clouds and craggy cliffs. All the preceding playful inventiveness is jettisoned for a routine hero-myth climax. What a letdown.
From: Telegraph.co.uk
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