This movie is based off of one of my favorite books, directed by one of my biggest idols, and starring a favorite actor of mine. Don't expect too much prejudice though.
When I first heard that Tim Burton was getting a chance to re-imagine one of the weirdest children's stories of all time, I smiled. Just imagine what he could do with the mad and wonderful characters. I even bought a poster of Johnny Depp in his Mad Hatter makeup, because I've never seen a more wonderful clown-leprechaun hybrid in my life.
But then the actual movie came out...
And, I really hate to say it, but it wasn't amazing. Many movie critics were saying that Tim Burton doesn't do his best work with remakes (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Planet of the Apes), but even they had a glimmer of hope when it came to his twisted mind.
The film opens with what the audience believes to be the night Alice had her famous Wonderland dream. Then it skips twelve years and she and her high-class mother are attending a stiff upper lip sort of party. It turns out to be the nineteen year old Alice's surprise engagement party.
Oh god, this is going to be a metaphor, isn't it? She's going to escape into Wonderland, stuff's gonna happen, and then when she returns, she'll be an independent woman and won't have to marry this Scottish lord. But there's still an hour and a half left. Burton's going to throw us the most creepy and engaging Wonderland we've ever seen. Alice was clever in the beginning of the movie and there were a few shining pieces of dialogue (especially a few lines between Alice and her possible future mother-in-law), but then the White Rabbit appeared.
Wonderland, or should I say 'Underland', is a macabre re-imagining of Alice's fantasy world. If you play video games, think of how Silent Hill takes an already freaky place, then rusts up all the walls, adds shadows and zombies and atmospheric music. It was sort of like that. Dark, very dark. Not that I minded, really. I'd have walked out if it was as colorful and migraine inducing as the 1951 Disney version.
But now onto the reason that most of us went to the theater: the Mad Hatter, the Red Queen, and the White Queen. Make-up, and CGI, and tongue-in-cheek humor galore. We all expected Johnny Depp to steal the screen, but it was really Helena Bonham Carter who made me laugh the most. With her head too big for her body, her strange vocal pattern, and her demeanor brought some life to the otherwise listless plot. Anne Hathaway played the White Queen, whose performance makes fun of her own "angelically-pure" image. She glides with this airy aura across the screen and throughout the film.
Depp. After appearing halfway through the movie, he almost becomes the main character. We know more about his past than Alice's, and his wicked strange accents and antics threaten to steal our attention. The problem is, we don't want them to. We sort of want to get to the end of Alice's story. His clown face begins to unnerve you after awhile, and you can't help but notice that Johnny recycled most of his motions from his much better role as Jack Sparrow. Pardon me, Captain. In fact, I have the DVD in my hand right now and his Mad Hatter is in the DEAD CENTER of the cover doing the patented Sparrow-walk. Excuse me, but who are you? You're not hardly Alice. (Yes, I resorted to quoting the movie itself for an insult).
The plot was a predictable fantasy coming of age thing. If you wanted a fantasy coming-of-age about a girl in a strange land, you should watch Spirited Away. Alice bumbles through the semi-recognizable settings of Underland, meeting CGI animals with amazing actors providing voices that barely help the linear plot. And one thing that drove me absolutely mad the entire time. The Mad Hatter character says it himself, "Beware the Jabberwock." It's not a Jabberwocky! That's just the poem's name!
I want Tim Burton to go home, kiss the kids, take out a pad of paper and write something strange. Original, crazy, and outlandish. He's the man who brought us Edward Scissorhands, Corpse Bride, Beetlejuice, and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Or better yet, I want to see him redo the classic TV series Dark Shadows.
Alice was dark, rarely funny, and even slightly confusing. But because of the costumes, effects, and Carter's performance, I stayed through the whole movie. I give the movie two out of five stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment