As the film opened, I had high hopes. It begins with the camera flying through the mists and fogs of London and I swear if you look closely enough you'll see the Cheshire cat’s smile upon the moon at the very start.
There's a cute scene between Alice as a child and her father as he comforts her after a nightmare.
What happens next will set you up for the disappointment of the rest of the film. There's a whole play on "oooh my mysterious dreams" between an older Alice played by Mia Wasikowska and her mother. It all comes across as falsely sinister and very "Oh, what will happen next, something dangerous, I bet!".
She falls down the rabbit hole and there's the well known scene of shrinking but forgetting to collect the key from the table. This isn't a bad thing that they took some material directly from the book. It's a great thing. The problem lies in them not adding any solid, new material. The only new material was a few nonsensical words they had mashed up and thrown in. They don't work; Nonsense needs context and meaning.
Johnny Depp played an animated, pleasurably insane Mad Hatter but was let down by the poor story and again, the poor scripting and lack of nonsense which made the book so fantastic. There's huge room for funny lines in the film, but they rarely appear.
The two queens were unconvincing. Helena Bonham Carter as the Queen of Hearts was annoying to listen to. It's a quirk of the character that she shouts all the time, but it was screechy and lacked the fun eccentricity.
Anne Hathaway was something worse though. For a film that habitually mimics other cinema conventions such as the evil being ugly and the good beautiful, the white queen was odd and plain at best.
The make up didn't do her justice.
At the point where she receives the Vorpal blade her expression was more of a nymphomaniac receiving a diamond-encrusted sex toy than that of a queen receiving her champion’s sword. Hehe.
There is a massive amount of computer generated imagery in the film. It seems to be of various qualities. Crispin Glover as the Knave of Hearts, for example, looks very unnatural when moving whereas the Jabberwocky is fantastic to look at with great animation as it shoves aside huge concrete columns and smashes everything in its way.
An Alice in Wonderland story where the world has become sinister is a great idea, but this film doesn't deliver. It doesn't distinguish itself from other bad-meets-good films while also gutting the story of both the magic in the book and the psycadelia of the 1951 cartoon.
