Alice In Wonderland!!!

 

So, I went with some friends to see Burton's Alice in Wonderland today and you know what? Tim Burton still reigns supreme.

I've been reading a few reviews here and there and they've not all been terribly kind, but it's not everyone's cup of tea, so those sorts of reviews are pretty common with a Burton movie. Not everyone gets it.

The cast was amazing with Alan Rickman as the Caterpillar, Crispin Glover as the Knave of Hearts, Helena Bonham Carter as the (evil but not that evil) huge-headed Red Queen, Anne Hathaway as the (weird) White Queen, Mia Wasikowska (resident Aussie, woo!) as Alice, Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat (an amazing character, actually. Stephen was creepy) and the inimitable (not Jeeves, lol) Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter.

The characters were really well formed and not reliant on Lewis Carroll's story. For example, Depp's Mad Hatter was genuinely mad. Like, woah. Because it's fairly common knowledge that hatters (or milliners, if you like) back then genuinely went mad because of mercury poisoning (mercury was in the glue for the hats), Depp's hatter really pushed the envelope there - he'd fly into rages, change his accent and become intensely fearful, as well as have oddly coloured eyes, skin and hands from the mercury. The Cheshire Cat was creepy...Playful, but creepy. Alice was a little wishy-washy in the beginning and held onto this belief that it was all a dream, but when she began to come around she really grew some cajones (not literally, lol) and did what she had to do. The Queens were cool...The Red Queen established dominion over all things living and the White Queen dabbled with the dead which we saw with her wacky potions (a special ingredient being a severed finger). Also the March Hare...Creepy, manic, mangy looking thing. Scottish, too.

We saw it in 3D, so I should comment on that too, I suppose, lol. I like how 3D is becoming the thing where it used to just be something used strictly for effect. I've always kind of wanted to see what Tim Burton would do with the landscape of Wonderland because in the Carroll's book it's a wonderful, unusual place, and Burton does not let us down. There's a lot of scorched land in this adaptation because the Red Queen's gotten a bit...Lax...With the Jabberwocky and has let him burn much of Wonderland to a cinder. It's kind of a weird juxtaposition between the opening scenes (and the book) with a dragonfly (or dragon fly) chasing a rocking horse fly (that always used to make me laugh as a kid...That and the bread-and-butter flies) through roses and flowers and around vividly coloured toadstools. The details were so eye catching, as in most Burton movies, and I kind of want to see it again just for the visuals to check that I didn't miss anything.

It was a good adaptation - Alice coming back to Wonderland (or Underland, as she learns it's really called) because they need a champion - and the characters were well developed. Also, I think there was a potential for a love story of sorts between Alice and the Mad Hatter...Perhaps not a total love story...She just got him, you know? And helped him ground himself during his, er, "moments", and he helped her be what she needed to be in order to save Underland. Also, the female hero is also a good theme...She really got it done. Slaying that Jabberwocky would have been a tough job - he was one scary bastard. Much less scary when Alice cut his slithery tongue off, though.

This might seem like kind of a gleaming review, but you know what? I couldn't give it a bad review even if I wanted to; Tim Burton is magical to me, he hasn't made a movie that I've disliked and I love the way his mind works, and Alice in Wonderland was one of the first books I read by myself as a kid and it was the first book that had a real impact on me - it wasn't entirely linear, there was something going on behind the story, and the characters were never what you expected them to be. I loved all of the clever little things, like the bread-and-butter flies I mentioned, and the Dodo and the Duck (which, if you were up on your Alice info, you might know that they are representative of both Lewis Carroll - whose real surname was Dodgson -  and Robinson Duckworth, the illustrator), then and now...And every time I read the book I see new things, and the movie let me see all of that in a new life.

So, if you like Tim Burton and/or Alice in Wonderland, I would recommend that you check this movie out and never mind what other reviews have said...Not everyone gets it, that's all.

P.S. When is a raven like a writing desk?