More like Alice in Boredom Land!

Hi there. So I know I promised more musings on freedom to all of you guys (I hear there's like 5 of you now), however generally I get distracted. And this rings crystal true in this current circumstance. SO instead I'm going to write on how infuriated I am by people who give up ideas for money by ripping apart Tim Burtons' Alice in Wonderland.

****SPOILERS ALERT****

Now, see how that last sentence pretty much gives away how the rest of this blog will go? It's rather fitting, cause that's EXACTLY what happens in Alice in Wonderland. Well, ok, there is 20 minutes (if that) of painful, predictable, obligatory back-story before she reaches wonderland. She's being forced to marry someone she doesn't love! OH WOW! I'd almost feel for her...If I wasn't so jaded and hadn't managed to see that in 30-40 different movies...OK, so actually that would suck, but it's very done and I hold Tim Burton in such high esteem he might as well be some Gothic, crazy-haired Film God, made of pure gold and shitting reels of cellulose nitrate film directly into our local cinema. This film is very uncharacteristic of him.

Tim Burton has always seemed to make films which comment on the negative sides of our society in tones measuring form the subversive way, albeit with some exceptions (The Nightmare Before Christmas was a bit more in-your-face about it). He's handled it with both humour and dark grittiness (The Corpse Bride compared with Sweeney Todd). However, in Alice in Wonderland (If you can even call it that, it's a re-imagining of Alice in Wonderland...in sequel format. It's like Disney thought "Oh, let's just cut the first part of the franchise and proceed straight to the sequel this time!") he's pandered to a wider audience and decreased the clever observations. Well, actually they've completely gone out the window. There is nothing really clever about it. He seems to be beating you with a wet fish filled with despair and shamed choices to make you understand how unhappy she is. The man she's meant to marry is a horrible caricature of a real person in his pomposity and nose-size, while she's realised her sisters husband is not just annoying, he's having an affair despite his adoring wife. Her mother seems not to listen to Alice's wants, her father's dead, her soon-to-be-mother-in-law is a cold bitch and she has no friends. We get it. Most people are shits. Thanks.

Anyway. So when Alice finally does get to Wonderland after surviving the boring relatives and the 5 minute drop through the patented "Alice in Wonderland Fantasti-Hole", which sounds much more interesting then it actually is, she meets up with the same 5 characters she's dreamed of since she was 6 years old. And doesn't remember ANY OF THEM!? COME ON! SERIOUSLY? She mentioned in the backstory just recently she dreamt of them the night before! These familiar staples of Alice flicks then lead her to the caterpillar, voiced by Alan Rickman. Alan tells them that Alice will slay the evil Red-Queens' Jabberwocky and restore the white queen to power. So far so standard. Hero is unhappy with current life, gets transported to magical world, fulfils prophecy and saves world. Brilliant Tim.

What's even more infuriating about that is that they basically reveal THE ENTIRE MOVIE within the first 25 minutes. Alice DOES find the sword to slay the Jabberwocky, she DOES join the white queens forces, the red queen IS evil and ugly, the white queen IS good and pretty and the Jabberwocky DOES die. That's it, see you later.

There are only a few things that set it apart from every other terrible movie in the 'made for kids' genre recently, and that is the way Burtons' imagery manages to largely survive despite the lacklustre story and sub-par monkey writing. The world of Wonderland is beautiful, there is no denying it. The CGI is well used (albeit pretty much everywhere, many actors are lucky to have survived the brush of CGI, handled with the grace of an arthritic wildebeest.) and the imagination obviously ran wild with some things. However, much of it seems to be Burton on creative auto-pilot. Some things were cool, such as tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum, helena bonham carters head, or the Knaves elongated legs and torso, but a lot of it seemed like he just got bored and slapped it together about 3 seconds before it was created. The queens minions are basically a big cat and a big bird, the Vorpal Sword (used to slay the Jabberwocky) is a rather unimpressive shiny triangle of metal with a handle, the landscape around the red queens castle is barren and lacking any sort of impact and, last but very much the most, the Jabberwocky was ultimately disappointing. It was just a slender dragon...That's it. I don't know, but given it was Tim Burton given the creative licence to make something that ultimately embodies all the fear, shame, despair and downright darkness from two different worlds of turmoil, in a physical form, I was expecting more than the "well lets just make it like a big bad Eragon and have her cut its' head off, eh?". And that's what happened. She cut it's head off...no surprises given you saw an image of it happening at the VERY START. Then the white queen is restored, the red queen banished, but not killed (cause killing anything but talking dragons is a sin kids) and the Hatter does a dance so unabashedly appealing to the minds of small children and people who read The Herald Sun that it honestly made me want to leave the cinema and shove the excrement found in the cinema bathroom all over Johnny Depps promos for the film.

Actually I have to say, apart from the dancing, the performances were extremely solid given the complete lack of any substance in the writing. Helena Bonham-Carter did a reasonable red queen, Anne Hathaway did a superb white queen, Johnny Depp was a sometimes inspiring, oft annoying Hatter, Rickman a good caterpillar, Christopher Lee an awesome Jabberwocky for the line and a half he had, etc. etc. etc. However it didn't stop that drooping feeling of disappointment when Alice gets everything she ever wanted and just about poops out a rainbow of sheer joy.

And that, folks, is the embodiment of what I felt with this film. Disappointment. Everyone heard Burton was doing an Alice in Wonderland remake and was like "WTF AWESOME" but ultimately it barely rates a sidebar in what looks like a promising year for film. It could have been good. It wasn't.
Thanks Folks, this has been Shady.