Alice in Wonderland (2010)
Directed by Tim Burton
Written by Linda Woolverton
Starring Johnny Depp, Mia Wasikowska, Helena Bonham Carter, Tim Pigott Smith, Anne Hathaway
Release Date March 5th, 2010
Published March 4th, 2010
The story of Alice in Wonderland is one of a teenage girl tripping down a rabbit hole into a magical land where adventure awaits. The sub-story however, is not onscreen but behind the scenes. It is an unfortunate story of a once promising filmmaker with the potential of a game changer but who sadly lost his way.
In Alice in Wonderland Tim Burton demonstrates that the promise he showed as a filmmaker who deftly combined unique characters with fabulous visuals has now devolved into a style over substance approach better at aping other storytellers’ visions but lacking what made their stories lasting and memorable.
The latest attempt to bring Lewis Carroll's wildest dreams to life stars newcomer Ali Wasikowska as Alice a teenage girl of privilege destined to marry a doofusy Lord (Tim Pigott Smith) and live out a sad existence as his concubine and servant. Naturally, Alice is non-plussed about this idea.
As Lord doofus ahem Lord Ascot goes to one knee in front of everyone they both know Alice runs off. It's not merely that she is horrified about getting engaged to such a dope, she also happened to see a strange looking white rabbit who seemed to be trying to get her attention. Following the rabbit, Alice finds herself at a rabbit hole which she falls into and winds up in Underland.
Underland is a magical, bizarre world of strange characters who act as if they know who she is, as if she'd been here before. Indeed she has but she doesn't quite remember it, even after being reintroduced to her friend the wild haired, hair-brain the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) who informs her of a particularly dangerous destiny ahead of her in in Underland.
This is extraordinarily rich material for a visual artist like Tim Burton and he dives right in with broad strokes of CGI landscapes and eccentric makeup and costumes. As Burton did with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Sweeney Todd he takes his pal Johnny Depp dresses him in wacky costumes and hair and aims to set him loose in a crazy looking world.
The formula unfortunately has lost its flavor in Alice in Wonderland. Both Burton and Johnny Depp seem to have made Alice on auto pilot relying on the things they have done before to carry this film to completion while bringing little new effort to bare. Alice in Wonderland is a lazy, laconic knockoff of what Burton and Depp have done before.
The diminishing returns in the career of Tim Burton are one of the saddest stories to be told. After arriving with astonishing promise in the 1980's, Burton has spent the past decade repeating himself with less and less interest. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a movie I really liked but received much fair criticism. Sweeney Todd wasn't great but was at the least a bit daring in approach.
Alice in Wonderland is simply bad. The filmmaking is lax from the cheap looking CGI to the strangely muted colors. The pace is almost non-existent, the movie crawls from scene to boring scene relying on our familiarity with Lewis Carroll's story to keep us involved.
The 3D aspect of Alice in Wonderland is utterly unnecessary and only serves to bring forward unfortunate comparisons to James Cameron's Avatar which from a visual standpoint blows Alice out of the water, exposing the films sluggish CGI and weak 3D posing.
It is clear now that the reason Tim Burton retreads so many famous stories isn't a wont to bring classic literature to the masses but mere laziness. Famous source material allows Burton to focus on creating fantastic new worlds visually or at least that's the theory.
In Alice in Wonderland however, the famous source material gives Burton the opportunity to relax and recreate the things he's done in previous works with little invention on his part. The approach extends to his star pal Johnny Depp whose lackadaisical Mad Hatter is a visual representation of the laziness of the director and indeed the production as a whole.
Alice in Wonderland is the first major disappointment of 2010, a lazy rehash of a well known story by a director resting on his reputation. It is heartbreaking to see what has become of the talent of Tim Burton. So much promise unfulfilled. We will always have Edward Scissorhands to remember him by but what of the future, duller, droopy remakes of other people's works with whatever existing tech best allows him to rest on his rep. It's just sad.
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