Review

Review Date: 7-March-10
Spoiler Rating: Low
Juju Judgment: Just OK

Alice in Wonderland (2010)

Allow me to take a moment and officially state that I do not sympathize with the 3D craze. This effect adds little to a film in my opinion, and certainly not enough to justify the extra dollars I have to pay for it. Everyone in the movie business loves it because it means a lot more money. But why are audiences willing to foster their greed?

Putting this issue aside (for now — I can't promise I won't gripe later), we come to the latest 3D "extravaganza" from a filmmaker for whom appearance has always been key. Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland is a visually striking fantasy because of its characters, costumes, and colors, but not because of 3D. While deviating from the plots of Lewis Carroll's books about the adventuresome Alice, the movie borrows the topsy-turvy world of Wonderland and such famous denizens as the White Rabbit, the Hatter, the March Hare, and the Cheshire-Cat, who steals the show in all his spectral, grinning glory. These creatures and their environment, trippy in their own right, are particularly so under Burton's spell, with the foremost trippy troublemaker being the evil Queen of Hearts (Helena Bonham Carter).

By featuring an Alice who is nineteen years old instead of a little girl (adequately if not memorably played by newcomer Mia Wasikowska), Burton makes a statement about refusing to let adulthood quench the fires of imagination. While I appreciate the idea of the heroine becoming a woman on her own terms, her right of passage is too frivolous to have much impact. The movie noticeably strains to create a degree of emotion that is just not there. This often involves animals, but it also involves the putative star, Johnny Depp. As the Hatter, he follows Alice around in inexplicable companionship, struggling for something to do besides looking mad and brandishing a Scottish burr. It does not help that Burton's musical partner, Danny Elfman, burdens the picture with a score that is alternately too grand or too suspenseful; it does not match the tale's weightlessness and therefore emphasizes it. As for the requisite girl-power action finale, this suggests that Burton admired certain scenes from The Lord of the Rings so much he decided to reenact them with Joan of Arc instead of hobbits and wizards. The very beginning and very end of the picture prove that this trip to Wonderland had a fully thought-out purpose. Yet everything in between feels flatly two-dimensional — even in 3D.

Copyright © 2010 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.