Review of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

The world of Underland has been besieged, enslaved by the evil tyrant Queen Iracebeth and her consort Ilosovic Stayne. Small pockets of resistance led by Tarrant Hightopp seek to retake the world and restore the true queen: Mirana. But hope is waning, as Iracebeth has terrible monsters at her beck and call: a shrieking bird, a terrible beast and a great dragon. The only chance remaining is in a prophecy held and told by wise old Absalem that says a champion will rise and – with enchanted sword in hand – will slay the mighty dragon and restore Mirana to the throne. And then all of Underland shall futterwacken once more!

Does this sound familiar? It should because this is the basic plot of every sword-and-sorcery fantasy epic ever. It’s also the story to Alice in Wonderland. Not Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and not Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, but rather Tim Burton’s interesting – if not entirely successful – attempt to apply cinematic method to literary madness. Lewis Carroll’s books were about ideas and his characters were philosophies with personality. Contrarywise – as it were – Burton’s movie is about one idea and his characters exist in complete abeyance to that idea. Basically, the movie has a plot. It’s a good plot and it’s a clever plot. And it’s smart and it’s funny and quirky and weird… but it’s not Alice in Wonderland.

Essentially, this is the story of a young woman trying to find her place in the world and turning to the imagery of her childhood for guidance. Alice is now nineteen and she arrives at a grand garden party, which she soon discovers is being held to celebrate her engagement to a particularly fussy young lord with digestive problems. The big revelation here, though, isn’t so much that Alice is to be married; it’s that everyone she knows has planned out this marriage – and in fact her whole life – without her input. So, she runs off to Wonderland, which also has a plan for her. Alice is set to engage the Jabberwock… in heated battle to the death (it’s like a marriage with swords). Her Wonderland destiny, however, proves less confining than her real life and it gives her room to identify with the other characters – in particular the Mad Hatter – so when she ultimately chooses to slay the Jabberwock, she liberates not only Wonderland, but herself as well; and then she returns home to find her own destiny.

This is actually a very nice little story, but it makes too much sense. Lewis Carroll wrote in a style of literary nonsense, which eschewed rationality and traditional structure by overflowing with meanings and allusions to things that remained ill-defined. The idea was to create a world that would never make sense, a truly absurd place that fascinates with each return visit because one can never fully understand it, never pin it down with the preconceptions of one’s own experience. But that’s exactly what Burton does. He grounds Wonderland. He gives the inhabitants names, villages, a society that reveals far too much of itself to us. The end result is Underland, a world of swords and magic and queens and knights and dragons. He takes the wonderful nonsense of the land down the rabbit hole and makes it into a more traditional fantasy world.

And worst of all, he makes it into such a horribly clichéd sword-and-sorcery fantasy world that cannibalizes Carroll’s books for names and parts in a way that almost borders on obscene. The worst victim is “Jabberwocky.” The poem itself is reduced to an ancient prophecy and its star monster is rendered a standard dragon on a mountaintop, which can only be killed with a special magic sword. Can you guess what that’s called? I’ll give you a hint: it starts with a VORPAL. And of course when Alice kills the beast (is it really a spoiler to say she kills the thing?), she yells out in good cheesy action quip form: “Off with your head!” And that’s clever, right? Because the Queen of Hearts says that all the time and now Alice has killed her pet, so she recites that famous line, turning the queen’s own tactics against her and it’s all action-movie-like, the way she says it, so we’re all cheering and it’s fun, yes? No. We don’t cheer, we wince. And it’s not clever, it’s tawdry.

In fact, the whole action finale has its problems… or rather one big problem: it’s dull. We have all these weird characters: Jub-Jub Birds, Bandersnatches, March Hares, the Red Queen and her army of card soldiers, the White Queen and her army of chess pieces (By the way, it is nice to see Looking-Glass get some recognition beyond the Jabberwock and the Tweedles). This really should be one goofy, eccentric fight, but it isn’t. There is this one nice part where the card soldiers make a house formation to load a catapult, but that’s about as fun as it gets. The worst of it is when the two male leads (the Mad Hatter and the Knave of Hearts) finally cap off their rivalry. This battle has been building throughout the film (or at least it’s been obvious throughout the film), but when the time finally comes, what do they do? They have a swordfight. Not even an interesting swordfight with ridiculous choreography (the kind of fight Jack Sparrow would have), but rather a simple, boring, mundane, humdrum, less-dynamic-than-the-lightsaber-fight-between-Obi-Wan-and-Darth-Vader-in-the-first-Star-Wars-movie, everyday, ordinary swordfight.

At least it’s short.

Actually the best thing you can say about the final battle isn’t all that bad: it doesn’t try to steal the show like so many third act action sequences do. And the show beforehand – and afterward – is thoroughly enjoyable once you get past the departure from its literary base. First and foremost, Wonderland looks great. There really is no one better than Tim Burton to bring this place to life. A lesser director, knowing that kids would see the movie, would’ve made Wonderland insufferably cutesy, but not Tim Burton. No, he includes a scene where Alice has to jump across the petrified heads of the Red Queen’s victims. The landscape itself is morose and foreboding and within seconds of seeing it, it is clear why a younger Alice is depicted awakening from this world as if from a nightmare.

Unlike the story, the art design is definitely in keeping with Carroll’s original vision, which was darker and scarier than most kiddy entertainment is allowed to be anymore. This is not to say Burton doesn’t have his own artistic input with this. While some elements (like the Jabberwock) look to be lifted straight from the illustrations of John Tenniel, most everything else seems to have come straight from Burton’s own imagination. I particularly like the armor of the card soldiers, the way the Jabberwock’s wings punch through the stone ground as he walks and that much of the final battle takes place on a giant chessboard. While Wonderland may be treated like a traditional fantasy world, it certainly doesn’t look like one.

The characters follow suit, each one of them funny and memorable, even if they don’t all mesh with their literary counterparts (The Knave of Hearts and The Dormouse being the most distinct). The two most interesting, though, are likely the Red Queen and the Mad Hatter (and this is likely because they are played by Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp).

The Red Queen is a composite of her namesake, the Duchess and The Queen of Hearts and she surrounds herself with nobles who wear ugly prosthetics so she doesn’t feel bad about her ridiculously large head. This isn’t kindness on their part but survival instinct because the queen tends to sublimate her insecurities through decapitation.

The Mad Hatter is just that: mad… and actually a hatter (rare to see that point so emphasized), who oscillates so fluidly between menacing, goofy and pitiable that he is able to provide some of the movie’s scariest, funniest and nicest moments, sometimes all at once. But then, Johnny Depp does have a talent for that, doesn’t he? He has this weird superpower that allows him to infuse dramatic resonance into even the most outlandish personalities. It’s like he was bitten by a radioactive Charlie Chaplin and his talent is not lacking here.

Points must also be awarded to Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum for their enjoyably circuitous manner of speech, the Cheshire Cat whose relaxed evasiveness befits his disappearing shtick and the March Hare who at one point takes a break from throwing random things at random people to be mesmerized by a spoon he’s holding. The Caterpillar also deserves a mention – not for any special insights in characterization or design – but because he keeps his trademark hookah. With all the melodrama surrounding smoking these days, I’m surprised the studio executives let that pass in a kid’s movie. I wonder if any uptight parents complained.

And Alice in Wonderland has a message, two actually: one for each age group in attendance. It reminds kids to believe in six impossible things before breakfast. It’s not exactly a new idea to encourage kids to indulge their imaginations, but it’s a good one all the same. And it reminds adults that their rules and traditions are not absolute and sometimes the dreams of childhood can hold the key to a happier life; and this is a lesson that many adults, with their adolescent obsession with maturity, could definitely stand to learn. And best of all, it makes these points with wit and cheer and none of the plodding pretentiousness of Where the Wild Things Are, a film that was ruefully stolen from its rightful audience.

Still, I think I would have preferred Alice in Wonderland if it weren’t pretending to be Alice in Wonderland. As it stands, it takes more of its influence from sources other than Carroll. Its characters have Harry Potter names and they populate a very Wizard of Oz kind of story told with a portentousness worthy of The Lord of the Rings (and the White Queen’s realm really looks like elves should live there). If Tim Burton had used this same premise with his own fantasy world (something like a kid-friendly Pan’s Labyrinth), then these allusions would just be interesting things to point out, not marks of disapproval. Also in a completely original work of fiction, comparisons with the Alice novels wouldn’t be able to weigh against it and then we wouldn’t have had to deal with those insufferable reworkings of Carroll’s themes, poems and words into hackneyed fantasy tropes. The characters, story and world here are all so well-handled, it’s just a shame we have all these nagging references back to the books that serve only to remind us that this isn’t what it’s supposed to be.

 But the movie is what it is and what it is isn’t bad. It’s funny and it’s smart and the line “Lost my muchness, have I?” should be put on bumper stickers. Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland may have lost Lewis Carroll’s originality, his range, his breadth of ideas, his sense of exploration and discovery, his clever absurdity, his vision, his flirtations with illogic and much of his muchness, but it does retain and emphasize his macabre sense of whimsy. And for that alone it is impossible not to like it. But it’s similarly hard to love it.

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