Oh, Alice!

"All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again."

-The New Battlestar Galactica

        -As stolen from Peter Pan.

    When I first read The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland in High School there was little to convince me that it was much more than nonsense. Clever nonsense, even funny nonsense, but nonsense.  It wasn't until I read it again in college for a fiction writing class that I began to see the age old rivalries, friendships, and odd allies woven into the ping-pong prose.  By the time I had finished reading Through the Look Glass I was convinced that Carroll had somehow misinterpreted the Lord of the Rings story from a drunken muse while smoking opium himself.*  There were ancient deeds and prophecies at play here, and very old magic.  

    So there was more than a little excitement and trepidation when it was announced that Tim Burton would be bringing it all to life with Disney and Johnny Depp.  The upside was Burton, the downside was Disney, and the wild card was Depp.  In the end, Disney won out, the wild card was wasted, and Burton's efforts could not overcome the staggering weight of Disney's need for conformity and bland entertainment.   I blame the failure of this movie on Disney only because they're evil and there's a mountain of their failure's while the combined failure's of Depp and Burton would not so much as fill the Doormouse's teacup.  Burton's signature artistic flair is there, and the bizarre creatures of Carroll's Underworld are well represented in this film.  In fact, the visual design and costuming are so good as to make the film nearly worth seeing on their own.  Sadly, they are all sound and fury, signifying nothing.  

    Here was a chance for perhaps the most eminently wonderfully-insane director of our time to tackle the most unlimited--yet well known and loved--of fantasy worlds.  Wonderland is the Calvinball of fantasy worlds.  The only rule is that you can't play it the same way twice. Yet that's precisely what this film does!  It quite literally holds Alice's hand through the same old adventures in Underland that she has had before.  And presumably will have again.  And this is all fun and fuzzy--but a terribly squandered opportunity to tell an interesting story around Carroll's creatures, poetry, rhyme, and word games.  The movie could have been dark.  But it wasn't.  It could have had plot twists.  But its plot was a flat board upon which a clever seven year old could have trod with ease.  There could have been as-yet-untold connections between the Underland and the world Alice inhabits in real-life.  But those overlaps the story did allow were superficial, unsubstantiated, and inconsistent.  There could have been discoveries of character--the Mad Hatter is Keyser Soze--the Red Queen is really the good one and the White Queen feasts on small children--Alice is actually the last human in the universe and the alien species that wiped out the rest of us is trying to make her feel at home but they have no idea what our world was like before they destroyed it so they keeping getting it all cattywompus--any of these new revelations would have made for a more interesting movie than the one I saw last night.  

    In charity to the cast, they were mostly rather enjoyable to watch for all the lines they were given, particularly those that made no sense.  The unfortunate exception here was Alice herself, who was not inspiring in any way, even when her own character was intended to be inspired.  Depp's Mad Hatter was interesting but his motivations throughout the film were unclear--and not in an intriguing way.  The best character, thankfully, was the Cheshire cat--whose only fault was not being nearly as creepy and foreboding as he should have been.  

There's a great deal more nits to be picked about this film and its failures to its origins, but to do so would be to spend more time bitching about it than I did enjoying it.  Carroll's books are a treasure to literary fiction and history.  My only hope is that this version of them was sufficiently entertaining to the uninitiated that perhaps the original works will be widely read by one or two more generations.

*Tolkein would later interpret the Lord of the Rings from an OCD muse while sitting in a concrete chair.