ALICE IN WONDERLAND: ’twas not brillig

ALICE IN WONDERLAND: ’twas not brillig

Mar 10

Let’s get this out of the way first: I’m not a fan of Tim Burton’s. I don’t find beauty in his ubiqutous and heavy-handed grotesque art style, I don’t think twisted dead trees scream “ROMANTIC DARKNESS,” I don’t dig women’s choirs yelling “LALA LALA LALA LALA” accompanied by high-pitched strings, and I don’t believe that the paler the skin, the more beautiful the character. Beyond the atrocious aesthetic trappings, his films aren’t very innovative or rich in thematic content either, they just seem like familiar old stories fed through a generic Tim Burt-o-matic that adds twisted dead trees and desaturates everything automatically. Oh and I’m not a huge fan of Johnny Depp’s, either. I’ve seen so much of him that his every mannerism and squint and growl has become too predictable. So let’s organise a big disclaimer first: if you like Tim Burton’s unique “style” and / or you love Johnny Depp no matter what he’s in, feel free to add 20 or 30 points to the my final score.

Now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s cut to the chase. Alice In Wonderland, which I viewed in 3D, is not a proactively bad movie, it’s just not very good. The first and biggest problem I had with the film was the story. If you were ever a child (statistics indicate this is quite likely) you almost certainly saw (or even read, if you weren’t an illiterate little humbug) some version of the Alice story, be it the Disney cartoon or some TV mini-series or some quasi-adaptation / sequel thing. In that case, you will be familiar with the world of Wonderland: shrinking potions and enlargement cakes and tiny doors and talking animals and game-themed Queens and “AWF WITH HER HEAD” and all that. Burton’s Alice is a direct retread of the original story, but it’s passed off as some kind of sequel, which as far as I can tell was decided upon for the following two reasons: 1) it means Burton could cast an older Alice, and not risk marketing the film solely to children, and 2) so Burton could use the passage of time as an excuse to run Wonderland through the Burt-o-matic machine, twisting and ageing the shit out of everything. Both weak excuses, and beg the question “Why bother making this movie at all?”

The familiar gang is here, playing by an impressive and varied cast, including the Cheshire Cat, Absolom, The Mad Hatter (with attendant March Hare and Doormouse), the Red Queen, the White Queen, Creepy Thin Guy (whose real name I can’t remember), Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and so forth. The performances appear to be pretty solid, and for once I didn’t find Johnny Depp’s performance overly predictable or distracting, probably because he kept changing accents at the drop of a hat. Alan Rickman and Stephen Fry are a blast in their underutilised roles as Absolom and Cheshire Cat respectively, but less fun are the Queens. In a film full of distorted physical features (more on that later), Anne Hathaway somehow comes away looking the most distorted, even though she’s had the least digital trickery applied to her face; the hard black-and-white make-up and costume thrown on her just jar with her otherwise quite attractive face, the poor thing. Then there’s Helena Bonham Carter, who isn’t nearly childish or annoying enough to play the Red Queen (that’s a back-handed compliment, I think). It’s like Burton’s obliged to invite his wife to play a major character in every single one of his films, even if she’s completely unsuitable. I wonder what his directions to her are like on set? How do you sculpt and mold (film-speak for “boss around”) your own wife and still get along at weekends? I dread to wonder.

Oh, and then there’s Alice, of course, who’s like an afterthought in the movie, played by Aussie newcomer (or so our media enthusiastically proclaim at the slightest provocation) Mia Wasikowska. Burton’s Alice is modernised to the point of cliche, and her hip behaviour jars violently with the stuffy Victorian reality she finds herself in. I try not to let logic into films like this, because logic isn’t treated very kindly in these circles, but in many ways the “real world” in Burton’s Alice is more surreal and unpredictable than Wonderland (hideously re-christened Underland in this film), mostly because Alice gets away with behaviour she would in reality have been severely punished for. I feel like I should also object to the heroic subplot applied willy-nilly to the Mad Hatter. The character is easily described with two short clauses: he is mad, and he is a hatter. He is, in fact, a hatter who is mad, as hatters often were, what with all the brain-clogging mercury they had to work with. This is reason enough for his eccentricity. There’s no need to flesh out his character. There’s even a flashback to the Hatter’s life before he was mad. This two-minute flashback contributes nothing to the film and could easily have been cut — maybe there were several more flashbacks that were shot but then cut because they didn’t fit, or something, but this flashback is lonely and completely unnecessary. Oh, and I nearly vomited when the Mad Hatter enaged in a one-on-one sword duel in the climactic chessboard showdown. Just because Johnny Depp is playing a character doesn’t mean you have to give him every opportunity to be cool. Oh and as cool as that mind-bending Michael Jackson-meets-CGI-madness dance scene at the end is, it completely ruins the tone of the rest of the film. I think it’s the music that breaks it. Leave it out, please.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, the CGI is awful. There isn’t a single convincing visual effect in the film. Alice shrinks and grows many, many times (usually an excuse to put a new Burt-o-matic produced dress on her, each one uglier than the last) and you can see preciesely the point at which the fabric is transformed into pixels, or you can tell she’s about to shrink because she’s wearing a digital dress, or as she shrinks the dress sort of swims around her like it’s not affixed in anything resembling time or space. I experienced some pretty annoying motion-sickness (technically simulation-sickness, because I wasn’t actually moving) when she fell down the rabbit-hole, because everything in the hole — Alice, various random items that miraculously never bump into and kill her, as well as the walls of the hole itself — seem to have been built by various different teams working in completely different buildings and then stitched together to create a “cool” 3D falling sequence that tries to evoke The Two Towers‘ nerve-jangling Balrog-opener, but succeeds only in creating a slippery, disjointed and thoroughly disorienting scene that goes on far too long and looks far too fake to be in any way useful to the story or enjoyable as a scene in its own right. Then there’s the physical distortion routines run on several actors –  a good idea on paper, but extremely distracting in execution. The Mad Hatter’s bulging eyes and gap-toothed grin might be faithful to the book, but they don’t translate well to a relatable film character. There is noticeable flickering around the Red Queen’s chin during some scenes, and sometimes her eyelines are off, just to achieve the remarkable (and I’ll admit, narrative-mandated) big-headed effect. Creepy Thin Guy has trouble bending over or touching anything, and I felt a vague sense of distress and disconnection whenever he tried to interact with other characters, a problem which was doubled when he interacted with the Red Queen. The effects are competent, but they’re not good enough to sell the universe.

Besides the distracting character-alterations, the animated characters and environments of Wonderland Underland are even worse. They’re not even on par with the stylised animations of Up or Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs or something, and when you surround your live-action actors with sub-par visual effects you end up getting unfavourably compared with George Lucas. At least the over-saturated CG effects in the last two Star Wars flicks had some cool design behind them, and were lit in an engaging way. In Alice it’s all ugly and dully lit, on top of being completely unconvincing in every way. The Queens’ military forces look and move exactly like each other, and when the screen is full of them, you get the disappointing feeling that most of the movie was cooked from digital copypasta, like Burton couldn’t pull the bucks to flesh his universe out properly. Alice seems doubly shallow and cheap when compared to the monster of design and detail that is Avatar — and we all know how rarely I mention Avatar in a favourable light (just learned it was snubbed at the Oscars — huzzah!).

My final criticism comes back to the first point: the plot deviates from the classic Alice formula only to include some nonsense about a prophecy and the Jabberwocky. I’m not exactly a literary expert or fanatic, and far be it from me to proclaim authority in matters such as this, but I’m pretty sure the Jabberwocky wasn’t actually part of the original Wonderland narrative, it was just some trippy poem embedded in an already-trippy literary work. It’s like the screenwriter scanned through the book, found the poem, and immediately thought “climactic showdown with mythical beast!” So Alice has to be built up into some hideously cliched warrior woman with a magic sword to vanquish the evil dragon monster. It’s like the second half of the movie becomes a cheap Harry Potter knock-off, with all the shonky prophecies and heroic self-doubt that goes on. Plus there’s the design of the Jabberwocky itself. I remember a time when things that were supposed to be scary were actually scary. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are scary. The Wampa in Empire Strikes Back is scary. Hell, even the invisible monsters from the Id in Forbidden Planet are a little bit distressing. But that’s because all these vicious beasties were introduced early, built up, and then revealed in a weighty, dramatic scene that completely alters the plot of the movie. The Jabberwocky is this spindly top-heavy black dragon-ish mess that wouldn’t scare a half-blind six-month-old infant with a chronically nervous disposition, let alone the average moviegoing adult. It’s so glossy and overproduced that it fails to pop out of the screen and be anything other than silly. It even breathes lightning, for crying out loud, like it’s too silly and broken to figure out how to use a scary element like fire.

So when you shove the age-old Alice tale through the Tim Burt-o-matic, you end up with a grubby, ugly, weightless, CG-heavy snoozer, with a plot and tone that borrows heavily from already dubious sources such as Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings flicks but fails to evoke even the basic heroism or escapism of either. Alice has its moments, but they are few and far between, and are usually sold with Danny Elfman’s predictable score rather than genuine narrative or emotion. Again, I’m no expert over here, but I’m pretty sure Alice In Wonderland was originally envisioned (and received) as a wacky, drug-fueled trip into a crazy place full of crazy and unpredictable things. How about instead of spoon-feeding us exactly the same goddamn thing over and over, take the universe and push it and pull it in new and interesting directions. It’s supposed to disorient and entertain the viewer, not bore him/her to tears with its familiarity. Get some new ideas, disorient us in new ways, don’t keep dipping into the same old well over and over again. Oh, and cut any characters you can’t afford to realistically animate or integrate into your movie. Oh, and please stop making gothic / romantic-styled movies if your name is Tim Burton. I’ve had enough of all the trees being dead all the time, and of all the faces resembling corpses. Try a thriller or a romantic comedy some time. Or better yet, judging by your Planet Of The Apes remake, maybe you should get a job in banking or architecture or T-shirt design or something.

Alice In Wonderland score

39/100