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As a college student, I find that I have less and less time to myself the further along I get into my degree. With that said, the less time I have, the less sanity I seem to hold onto. In an attempt to hold onto what I can, my friends and I get together every Friday night for movie night. Generally speaking, we try to find movies no more than two people have seen, and if we are feeling adventurous we may even watch something off online reviews. So I've decided to dedicate this blog to movie reviews of what we watch. Which means the movies I review, or assualt, will be of a very wide range from indy, foreign, to mainstream.
With that said, I'm going to go against that. We watched 13th Warrior this week, but the following day I watched Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. I decided, because of my love of Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, and Alice in Wonderland, that this may be a good starting place for my first blog, ever.
Oh, Tim Burton. I grew up as a goth kid, an outcast, etc, and I loved Nightmare Before Christmas to the point of obsession. I loved his quirky art style, his music choices, and as a child, his storytelling. I guess all things get ruined with age. The announcement of Alice in Wonderland made me as giddy as a five year old on Christmas Eve. How could this go wrong? All my favorite things rolled up into one cinematic ball! For lack of a better word, Fail. This was my second time watching the movie. My first, was in theatures at its launch. It ended with me swearing off any further Tim Burton and Johnny Depp combos. I decided to give it a second chance because everyone kept telling me I was being too harsh. So here it goes, my new found opinion.
Overall, the actors do well with what they were given. I, suprisingly, haven't a single complaint about any of the choices for the roles. I love Anne Hathaway as the White Queen and Crispin Glover as the Knave. Perhaps this is because these are two new characters to the Alice Cinimatic cannon. There is nothing to compare them to. Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum, played by Matt Lucas, are as quirky as ever. As for everyone else, I give them credit for sucking it up and putting forth full effort to make some sense of the characters and story they were given. To start, the chesire cat, why no riddles?? Isn't that the whole point of the character? I love his design. He is a beautiful looking character, and Stephen Fry does a beautiful job voice acting for him but quirky moments aside, the chesire cat becomes, simply, a plot device. He has no real character, no puzzling riddles, nothing to link this to the chesire cat of the old disney film or original book. The same goes for Dormy. This character upset me from the moment she/he/it steps onto the screen. No longer the narcoletpic little creature of past, now Dormy wants to get out and fight. Making up for lost time, I suppose. I cannot even fault Barbara Windsor, Dormy was given next to no real lines, and a serious lack in personality. Next on my list of what the hell happened is Helena Bonham Carter. I do enjoy her as the Red Queen, but what is with the random Barbara Walters impression? She slips in and out of it throughout the entire movie. I'm not sure why this wasn't addressed at any point during filming. It makes her come off as a sloppy actress, which I don't truly believe her to be. She may not be my favorite actress in the world, but I think she should be better than that. Otherwise she plays crazy well, and the Red Queen is just that. She is one of the few characters who held up in this topsy-turvey world. Finally, the biggest and most obvious disaster: The Mad Hatter. Somewhere along the line he missed a few of his anger management classes and went from the slightly off the rocker but still fun neighbor to the creeper down the road who may just be hiding a shotgun. Johnny Depp, as always, was a champ. He played the character well, but the character was written terribly. There are different degrees of mad. The March Hare, was still the same goofy, crazy, loon as he had always been, but the Hatter went off the deep end. They give a reasonably valid explination for this in the story, but it still feels too far. If the whole movie doesn't go that far, you can't allow only one character to cross that line. It has to be all or nothing.
As for the overall story, the general idea makes sense and fits well. Alice is, again, unable to deal with her real life problems. She runs off into Wonderland, oh I'm sorry, excuse me, Underland? I'll address that in a bit. Once there, she has to save Wonder...Under...whatever you want to call it, once again. Okay, I'll accept that. But Tim Burton starts the movie with her as a child talking about this dream, which the audience is led to believe is her first adventure in Wonderland. The day before her second adventure, she brings up the dream, yet once there she is suddenly unable to remember anything. It's like this is all new to her. Why bring up the dream if you are just going to erase it from her mind? Obviously she didn't really remember
anything useful at all. The change in name from Wonderland to Underland adds nothing to the story at all. It simply allows for the Caterpiller, played by Alan Rickman, to continuely to call her "stupid". Hurray for positive reinforment! Tim Burton also takes it upon himself to rename half the characters in the movie with names that are impossible to catch. The last piece of story I'll attack is the need for Tim Burton to bring Wonderland definitely into reality. The great thing about Wonderland is like the movie Inception, was it real or just a dream? Nope, Tim Burton has decided that any injuries sustaned in this mystical place will carry into reality. Injuries that will be hard to explain unless a bear was running rampant in the hedge maze.
My final piece to address is the visuals. If nothing else, Tim Burton is an artistic genius. The settings are stunning, even the more dark and dreary ones. The vibrant colors and classic Burton-style curls are splashed throughout the world and make it a place of magic. Too bad beauty does not make up for lack of substance. Costuming is well done with the exception of the Hatters very Wonka feel. I'll even let slide the bizarre need to make the Red Queen and her court have oddly sized features. I am still on the fence about the Red Queen's castle. As a major fan of the classic computer game American Mcgee's Alice, I feel as though the castle is a little too close to the one in the game, which is from the 90s. But maybe that's just me, it's too hard to find images to confirm my suspicion and playing through the game right now to simply answer that is a bit too time consuming. But regardless, the castle is one of the more stunning pieces in the movie.
So now that this is just short of a flat out rant, I will conclude by saying that I did indeed judge it too hard the first time through. I'm sure you are thinking "What? This is a nicer opinion?", but it is. All of these things are small pieces of a very large puzzle. Music is fitting, costumes beautiful, visuals overall are beautiful, actors are amazing, it's just the story and characters that fall flat to someone who has spent their life engrossed in Wonderland. For a fan of the original story and characters of Alice, this is a hard movie to watch and love. It's not that it's bad, it's just not good in the wider scheme of things. For someone new to Wonderland, this may just be a new take on an old classic. A new Wonderland for a new age. Maybe I've just gotten old. Oh no, that's a terrible thought. I'm going to go deal with my on coming quarter of a century crisis now...
