| Rating: | ★★ |
| Category: | Movies |
| Genre: | Science Fiction & Fantasy |
The one thing I liked about this movie was how it made me miss the old animated Alice in Wonderland. It's quite sad for a director who built his reputation on charming quirks to be out-charmed and out-quirked by a 50's animation feature.
The only thing worth writing home about are the visual effects, but the ones employed by the movie contribute little to the unity of the experience. I almost fell asleep during heavily CGI-infested final battle scene. If your central visual piece causes yawns, its time to rethink the strategy. See: Matrix Reloaded.
The acting is dull. Johnny Depp is badly restrained. The lead actress is about as charming as an English goldfish. Anne Hathaway acted like she was lost in a high school production of Cinderella. Helena Bonham-Carter was the only one who looked comfortable in her role.
Worst of all is the screenplay. They tried to shoe-horn in Lewis Carroll's wierd poem "Jabberwocky" into the Alice storyline, apparently forgetting that the poem's hero was male. (Which is why Depp's Mad Hatter keeps calling Alice "he" for no explained reason.) The result is a battle sequence between a talking winged chameleon and a girl wielding a sword that has to be made of paper for someone of her stature to lift it. (They even ripped off the dragon kill animation from Dragon Age: Origins.) By the end of it all, not only did the cheap grrl power individualistic sentimentality leave a bad impression on me, my suspension of disbelief also lay murdered on the cinema floor.
All these could be hand-waved with the usual "it's a kiddie movie" excuse (watch "Up", you lazy bastards!), but the decision to cast a young adult pretty much puts that excuse in the trash bin. By the end, I was quite hoping for a sequel, where Alice catches Malaria in some swamp-infested jungle near Rangoon and ends up eaten by a tiger. I'd pay to watch that. Unlike Alice, I tend to think of the very, very possible.*
*Alice keeps saying that she believes in the impossible. Blech.
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