Overall Rating: B+
Filmmaking/Artistic: A
Storytelling: B−
MPAA Rating: PG (Some violence… Might be to scary/intense for children under 10)
The pitch
Let’s do the whole Charlie and The Chocolate Factory bit again with Alice in Wonderland. Wouldn’t Johnny Depp be cool as the Mad Hatter?
Overview
A re-telling of an already surreal story, Alice In Wonderland is visually amazing, and the story moves along, although it does drag in places. If you’re a Tim Burton / Johnny Depp / Helen Bonham Carter fan, you’ll like it a lot. If you aren’t, this won’t be the movie where you change your mind.
Review
There’s really not much to say. In this version of the story, Alice is 19, and is offered marriage to the son of her late father’s business partner. We see in the flashbacks that the her dad was the kind of Hollywood dad that always dies before the movie starts, because he’s just too cool to survive. (Like in Ever After.) He’s wealthy and brilliant, and she is the love of his life and the heir to his good qualities. And oh yes, he comforts her about her nightmares regarding a place with a blue caterpillar and tea-drinking rabbits.
Present time, dad has died, dad’s business partner has bough the business, and now wants his fop of a son to marry her. Aa a party where everyone but Alice knows that her engagement is the point. He proposes with everyone watching (although in this tale you can tell that the party guests, or at least their personality types, will re-appear in Wonderland a la The Wizard of Oz) , but Alice needs a moment to think, because this-is-what-everyone-wants-for-me-n0t-what-I-want rules the day. So she sees and chases the white rabbit, falls down a whole and the familiar story starts.
Everyone in Underland keeps asking if she is the Alice, and she says no, but the other characters keep proving non-answers. She runs into the standard characters, the red queen, the white queen, the mad hatter, etc., and the story is nice if predictable.
There’s no real reason to discuss the story any further. The scenery and movie making is wonderful, and very Tim Burton, right down to the Danny Elfman music. Helena Bonham Carter rocks as the evil red queen with a Barbara-Walters-esque speech impediment. Johnny Depp, one of Your Movie Monkey’s favorites, is good but perhaps a bit over the top as the Mad Hatter. (OK, it’s hard to explain how an unbelievably over-the-top character can be over-acted, but it does seem so.) Relative newcomer Mia Wasikowska shines as Alice, not overly feminist and yet not willing to live with the status quo. And the other character actors are also fantastic.
The story does drag in places, and although Your Movie Monkey is a huge Tim Burton fan, the one area where he falls down a bit is in the mixing of CGI and live action. It just doesn’t seem seamless. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the opening scene in the chocolate factory with the chocolate river just looked like a movie set. Here, it’s not quite as obvious, but there are times when the integration fails a bit.
If you are not a particular fan of Tim Burton, this one won’t make you change your mind. But if you like it at all, it is an entertaining 2 hours of great effects and great acting.
The movie has some head lopping and threatened head lopping, and may be a bit scary for young kids.
