Alice in Burtonland

I knew going in that the conceit of the film was to push Alice 13 years into the future from her childhood visits to Wonderland so that Tim Burton could take as much license as he wanted in creating his own dreamscape with the place.

So why didn't he?

Here's the most damning criticism I can offer: I was so terribly bored.

The film starts with what I imagine to be a wink at the London treasure, Peter Pan, with an entrance into the film across the rooftops and through the upper shutters of the windows. But Burton has completely lost his touch with whimsy and neverlands.

The first question I had, about 2 minutes into the film, is why does he make up his 20 year old Alice to appear to be an opium addict? Is she so sleep deprived from her "dreams" of Wonderland that she needs the darkest circles under her milk white skin? Burton has a thing for the white undead look, but why?

One cute line, "Charles was a man of vision" was welcomed as a nod to the true master of Wonderland, but then why not try to learn from him instead of departing so radically from his world of logic and nonsense to create yet another great battle between bland and evil so that the boring, useless, ethereal blandness can rule the world? especially if the point of the film (reiterated multiple times) is that crazy people are the best? (My apologies for that terrible sentence. It does mirror the film quite well.))

They call it Underland this time around, which is at least honest.

Burton loves sleep, loves dreaming, embraces nightmares. But what he brings to Underland is nothing new or exciting. We've been here before, with the black and white swirling checkerboard patterns in tow. Alice is nothing special, even visually. The Hatter is a saving grace, but he's not enough. Neither was the voice of Alan Rickman, as Absalom (yes, you read that right) the hookah-smoking blue caterpillar.

Was that a nod to Avatar, a better visually conceived film, with the dandelion spores following Alice into the Red Queen's lair after the odd crossing of the moat? That crossing, over floating heads, had enough surrealism to be interesting, at least.

The Red Queen's card soldiers' uselessness reaches stormtrooper incompetence almost immediately and their soulessness is mirrored in almost every other character in the film. I was never engaged or cared about any of them. Pack of cards, indeed.

George McFly is the Red Queen's right hand man and I kept waiting for Biff to come in and flick him on the head. Oddness is not synonymous with interesting.

The Red Queen's lair was the best conceived, with all those meaningless hearts everywhere, while the White Queen and everything about her and her kingdom was simply insipid.

Alice, brandish your Vorpal sword and put the White Queen out of her tedious mind-numbing misery and then plant a big wet one on the Hatter and ride off with him on the back of that Bandersnatch into the sunset, girl. And even that couldn't have saved this film.