My Review: Alice in Wonderland (2010) (7/10)

¨You used to be much more…muchier. You`ve lost your muchness.¨

(7/10) Those are the words the Mad Hatter tells Alice after she has returned to Wonderland, but now much older as a 19 year old girl who has no memory of her last visit there when she was a little kid. Tim Burton directs this classic Disney tale and he teams up once again with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. They have already worked together in Sweeney Todd, Tim Burton`s Corpse Bride and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Depp and Burton have a profound respect for each other and it is always a pleasure to experience one of their creative films. When I heard they were going to work together in this film I was really excited because I knew that Burton could do something memorable with Wonderland. He is one of the most imaginative and creative directors and Wonderland was way ahead of its time when it came out in 1951. I wasn`t a big fan of the cartoon because it was missing a story, but the characters and the world that was created was very imaginative nonetheless. Burton had a lot of interesting material to work with here and he did a great job although perhaps I was expecting a bit too much. This is far better than the cartoon because there is a better plot and a decent story this time, but the characters didn`t seem as mad as they were in the original. I was surprised that this time around they all made sense, but I guess you need that in order to have a good story. The visuals and the effects were also amazing so Burton was successful in recreating this world.

The story takes place many years after Alice has visited Wonderland and she has no memory of her visit there. She is now a nineteen year old girl who is getting ready for a banquet which is thrown in her honor although she doesn`t know it yet. Alice (played by Mia Wasikowska who could recently been seen in Amelia) is not happy about having to dress up for the event and she is still dreaming about a different world where she doesn`t have to do what she is expected. She still has some of the same attitudes that she had in the original film. Alice soon finds out from her cousins that the banquet is thrown in her honor because Hamish (Leo Bill) is going to propose to her and that she is expected to say yes because he is a Duke. Alice doesn`t have feelings for Hamish and she can`t say yes and is suddenly distracted by a rabbit that is running across the yard and decides to follow it. She ends up falling through a rabbit hole and ends upside down in a locked room very similar to the one in the original film. She finds a key in the table but it only opens a very small door so she can`t get through it. This is perhaps one of the most similar scenes to the original except that there is no talking doorknob this time, and Alice still has no memory of this place even though she goes through the exact same situation of shrinking and then getting larger. Once in Wonderland, or should I say Underland because the other was the name that Alice had given it when she was a child, she runs into the same creatures she had been with in the past such as Tweedledee and Tweedledum (Matt Lucas), the white rabbit (Micheal Sheen from Frost/Nixon), the blue caterpillar (Alan Rickman from the Harry Potter series), the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), and the Red Queen (Helen Bonham Carter) among others. There are also some new characters like the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), Stayne the knave of Hearts (Crispin Glover from Charlie`s Angels), Bandersnatch, and the Jabberwocky.

What I enjoyed more about this film than the original one is that there was an actual plot to this story. Alice had a mission this time around and she was not just running after the white rabbit. There is much more action and Burton does a great job at recreating this world. Johnny Depp is great as usual and his character was probably one of the best in the movie and the reason why many people wanted to see Alice in the first place. Mia Wasikowska also does a good job as she has the lead role in the film. Burton still recreates certain elements from the original such as the entrance to Wonderland, the scene where the Red Queen is playing wicket using a flamingo for a stick, and the famous riddle that the Mad Hatter asks, ¨why is a raven like a writing desk? ¨ to which we still don`t get an answer too because there isn`t one really. The movie works and the visuals are great, but you are still left with a sense that there could be so much more done with this movie. Wonderland is a magical place, but to rephrase the words the Mad Hatter tells Alice it seems that this movie was missing something more…muchier. We could have used some more of Burton`s famous muchness.