A Magical Adventure (Washington Post)

Is there a better movie-match than Lewis Carroll and Tim Burton? With Alice in Wonderland, his boldly revisionist remix of Carroll’s beloved tales of a young girl’s journey down a rabbit hole and through a looking glass, Burton finely balances excess and restraint to create an absorbing, visually rich world of his very own.

Burton has wisely avoided producing a mere pop-up illustration of the books, instead finding inspiration in Alice, the Mad Hatter, the Red Queen and other familiar characters and putting them into a brand-new story. His most nervy decision — making Alice a 19-year-old young woman on the verge of a tiresome marriage — also proves to be his best. Alice in Wonderland is not just a refreshingly feminist version of the classic hero quest but a forum for a terrific breakout performance from newcomer Mia Wasikowska.

Burton’s signature gnarled, gothic esthetic runs through Alice in Wonderland, which features Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, he of the oddly dilated pupils and accents that run from a lusty Scottish brogue to an upper-crusty lisp. It’s worth the price of admission if only to hear Depp give sonorous voice to Carroll’s slithy toves and borogoves, but it’s the women who steal the show, from the sombre, self-possessed Wasikowska (familiar to fans of HBO’s In Treatment) to Helena Bonham Carter’s scenery-chewing tantrums, to Anne Hathaway’s very funny turn as a too-too good girl.

Alice in Wonderland? Is that what it is? Because it doesn’t look like any Alice I know. It has action scenes. Traumatic flashbacks. Heartfelt bonding between Alice and the Mad Hatter, whose gimongous green eyes swell with emotion. There’s even a scene where Alice gets hit on by the Knave of Hearts, one of the sleazier conceits in this fumbled Disney update.

But its single biggest failing — an affront to Lewis Carroll and the charms of nonsense literature — is the fact that it makes sense. Director Tim Burton and screenwriter Linda Woolverton have laboured hard to shoehorn the arch, asymmetrical balderdash of the original works (both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass) into a 3-D, CG-enhanced extravaganza of boring and time-worn fantasy conventions. It isn’t often a 3-D movie almost puts me to sleep.

Visually, there’s fun to be had. Landscapes are Burtonesque, fingered branches scratching an ashen, moonlit sky. Every other figure is elongated or exaggerated: the ping-pong eyes of the Hatter, the stretched-out bod of the Knave. The scenes with the mondo-headed Red Queen are fabulous, in a sick way, as a hissy-fitting Helena Bonham Carter warps her R’s (“It is my cwown!”) and barks out the movie’s best line (“Anyone with hair that large is welcome in my court,” she says of Alice).

Burton can do what he likes, of course; the classics generally survive even the lamest adaptations. Yet the title suggests a film that simply isn’t. Better Alice in Burtonland, Alice in Disneyland or maybe Alice in Narnia, which would own up to an obvious debt. “I’m sorry,” says the lass herself, “I don’t mean to be the wrong Alice.” Not your fault, kid. But thanks for apologizing.

Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is equal parts Lewis Carroll and Grace Slick. It’s inspired by Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, but also, apparently, by Slick’s psychedelic ’60s anthem, White Rabbit. It’s a trip, man.

Burton has imagined what at times is a literally eye-popping world of beasties, Scots accents and gloom. “Logic and proportion” go out the window as Alice drinks this and shrinks, eats that and grows, and everyone and everything around her is stretched, bulbously blown up or otherwise deformed in endlessly inventive ways. Whatever the virtues of Avatar, this is the most fanciful use of 3D ever to hit the big screen.

And Burton has cast it near perfectly. Anne Hathaway is a pale and dainty “Glenda the Good Witch” sort of White Queen. HUGE-headed Helena Bonham Carter is the eternally ill-tempered Red Queen, barking at her court of freaks and frogs and her playing-card soldiers in an Elizabethan temper.

“OFF with their heads!”

And Johnny Depp, as a madder-than-usual hatter in revolt against that tyrant, toys with a Highland accent.

“Dooooon with the bloody Red Queen!” he purrs.

The returning Alice (Mia Wasikowska) may not be “the real Alice.” That’s the silky, smoky opinion of the wise caterpillar (Alan Rickman’s voice animating a purple insect in a haze of hookah smoke). She has to remember how to be Alice, this time in Underland.

Snatches of Carroll poetry and jibber-jabber pepper the oft-nonsensical and occasionally unfathomable dialogue. But the Carroll characters are here, mostly as you remember them.

And if it’s not the Alice of your Disney childhood, enjoy the trip. Just remember, as Grace Slick sang, “what the dormouse said. Feed your head. Feed your head.”

One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small, and the pills Tim Burton gives you don’t do very much at all.

With apologies to Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit, that more or less sums up Alice in Wonderland, the director’s middling new version of the Lewis Carroll tale. It has its successful moments but it’s surprisingly inert overall, more like a Burton derivative than something he actually did himself.

Through no fault of its own, Alice also has the misfortune of being the first major 3-D release to come out after the Avatar revolution, and when you add in that Burton chose to shoot in 2-D and have the footage converted, it inevitably plays like one of the last gasps of the old-fashioned ways of doing things.

Given the strength of Burton’s imagination, it’s not surprising that many of the creatures in the movie are engaging, especially if, like that rabbit, they are voiced by top British actors.

The unsettling Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry) is hard to forget, as are Absolem the Blue Caterpillar (Alan Rickman), Bayard the Bloodhound (Timothy Spall) and fright legend Christopher Lee as the dread Jabberwocky.

Rather less satisfying is the script’s notion that the creatures spend much of their time bickering as to whether this Alice is the same person who came down the rabbit hole a decade earlier and, if she is, whether she has “lost her muchness” in the intervening years. They even give her a hard time for getting the name of the location wrong: It’s Underland, she’s disdainfully told, not Wonderland.

These disputes soon become tiresome, even if one of Alice’s champions is played by Johnny Depp. His Mad Hatter is a genuine fashionista whom we get to see designing wacky headgear like there is no tomorrow. There’s no denying Depp’s gifts and abilities, but this performance feels both indulgent and something we’ve all seen before.

What is even more unfortunate is the film’s attempt to turn itself into an Underland version of The Lord of the Rings, complete with massed forces of good and evil inevitably headed toward a sadly generic CGI battle to end all battles.

Burton and company have taken special care to provide pictures of Alice as a warrior princess in full Joan of Arc armour as a female empowerment icon for the girls in the audience.

While that kind of thing is always in short supply, it would be nicer if that image—and the movie as a whole—felt less like corporate moves and more like situations that came from the heart.