Certain directors become known for certain styles, a fact to which even the most film-illiterate of us can attest. M Night Shambalan loves his twists, James Cameron loves epics and Tarantino, bless his violin-case-shaped chin, loves women’s feet. What’s also true is that this can get old fast. Once a director gets respected enough, people stop having the stones to tell Jackson to edit, to tell Shambaylan to stop shoehorning in twists and to tell Tarantino to either find a woman with a very specific fetish or to get some help.
You'd like her to wiggle her big toe, wouldn't you Quentin?
Now for the most part this isn’t a problem, as long as the films stay at the level of quality that made us love them in the first place.
Which all segues nicely into my review of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.
Ask anyone what a Tim Burton film is going to be like, and they can likely tell you the style and most of the cast off the top of their heads. When I heard he was making a film of Sweeney Todd, I didn’t need to see the trailer to know who the leads would be, singing talent be damned. Unfortunately his latest outing retains all the Burton clichés, but is sadly lacking in quality.
Most people I knew were absolutely salivating at the thought of Burton throwing his macabre monocle over Lewis Carroll’s already creepy-as-all-hell novel. I never thought I’d say this, but he should have taken notes from the 1953 Disney version. That took Carroll’s vision and made it into an unwholesome metaphor for a young girl in an adult world, trying desperately to understand the strange new land she found herself in. Burton’s version is depressingly lacking in the surrealism that makes Alice so memorable.
I judge films solely on whether they scare oysters.
Written as a sequel to the original, Burton’s Alice shows us the heroine ten years on, being pushed into a life of quiet respectability by her peers, her individuality suppressed by corsets and high society. So far, so mildly interesting. The film begins in such a way that I thought they were going to take the path of implying Alice’s insanity and how it affects her life in the real world, which would be nicely dark, but then the film goes down the rabbit hole entirely.
I’ve read the books and seen the 1953 film, and I’m thoroughly glad I have, because if you haven’t, you won’t have the faintest clue what’s going on. None of the characters are introduced properly so if you don’t have a clear idea of what each one should be in your head beforehand, you’re just not going to care as much as there’s no characterisation or explanations given as to why egg-headed manchildren and talking flowers are greeting Alice like she’s a long-lost sister. I realise it’s a sequel, but it seems lazy to me that Burton would redesign all the characters and introduce a whole new plot involving them, but not bother with any kind of paced introduction so we actually care.
Speaking of lazy, the plot is more clichéd than Avatar. I’m almost impressed at that. The plot follows the exact same as that of The Chronicles of Narnia. (slightly fitting I guess, as C.S. Lewis and Lewis Carroll were contemporaries) The young heroine is thrust into a situation where a lot is expected of her as to ‘who she is,’ she rails against it, there’s a big evil blah blah blah, then she decides to fight and puts on armour. We’ve seen this before Tim, and while it’s insulting to make such a lazy stab at a plot, it’s even more so to do it using characters you’ve ripped from our collective childhoods.
There's something faintly upsetting about Google Imaging 'crying child'
I’ll pause at this point (angry bile burning my throat, cigarette dangling disdainfully from my lips) to discuss something more positive. Honestly, if I had sat a few of my film-buff mates and asked them to cast a big-budget version of Alice, I can’t see them choosing anyone else for the different roles, and for the most part Burton’s choices do well with what they’ve been given. Alan Rickman’s half-Snape, half-stoner Caterpillar is a joy to listen to, although that could be down to the fact that the man sounds like if dark chocolate and cigarettes could talk. Similarly inspired is the choice of Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat, who’s CGI avatar was probably my favourite from the entire film. Surprisingly good is Anne Hathaway’s turn as the prim and proper White Queen, who flits around, sniffing at things like a ‘shrooms-addled butterfly.
Unfortunately the cliché curse strikes again, and Tim Burton’s two pets Helena and Johnny deliver singularly average performances. I love Helena Bonham Carter, I do, but if she had channelled a bit more Bellatrix and a bit less spoilt-child, I would have enjoyed her performance a lot more. And as for Depp…
Look, I’ll be honest. What the hell was Burton thinking? Right, I realise it’s Johnny Depp and he has a certain reputation for delivering gold on the least bit of encouragement, but that shouldn’t be treated as a challenge. Its tennis players that get handicaps, not actors. I imagine that Burton sat down, looked at the character list and who he could cast Depp as, and was stuck with the Mad Hatter. He then proceeded to inflate the character into some kind of weird mentor-warrior-jester… thing just to justify the paycheque. The character of the Hatter makes very little sense, and not in the way I was hoping.
I’m not even going to talk about the dance.
Okay… measured review Dave, measured review… The art design in the film isn’t bad. Visually, it’s nothing stunning (mainly because very little of it is delivered in the right way, it’s more of a blur of colour without enough time to take in the finery) but there are a few interesting designs, specifically the White Knights and Red Soldiers, the Cat and little gem that is the March Hare. He got the most laughs from me throughout the film.
Alice herself is serviceable, although a bit wooden. We realise she’s supposed to be in shock, but she doesn’t shine as a girl in a mad world, afraid of losing her sanity but more afraid of being stuck with the sane.
I wanted to like this film, I did, but as soon as it ended I went home, opened a beer and watched the Disney version to see a truly imaginative and dark film. There’s something wrong when that happens after a Tim Burton film.
Oh, and why the hell had the Dormouse a sword?