Alice in Wonderland (PG)

Alison Rowat's Review

What is the sensible course to take with nonsense? It’s far too plain a riddle to feature in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, but it’s a poser that confronts every director who takes on his work. Tim Burton is the latest to do so, and his answer to the question is both surprising and disappointing. The director of some of the flightiest fantasies in cinema has tried to knock some sense into Alice, making the tale duller in the process.

Burton, as you would expect, provides a feast of visual treats, proving himself to be as skilful with 3D as he has been with stop-motion animation. He brings new twists to familiar characters, and the film boasts an exquisite villain in the shape of Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Queen.

But the visuals and Bonham Carter aside, Burton’s take on Carroll is distinctly underwhelming. This is a movie that refuses to lose its head, as every good Alice adaptation should. As for the crimes against Scottishness perpetrated by Johnny Depp (the Mad Hatter) and Paul Whitehouse (the March Hare), we’ll return to those in two shakes of a white rabbit’s tail.

Linda Wolverton’s screenplay takes up the tale as Alice, now a young woman, is having a party thrown in her honour. Mia Wasikowska, playing Alice, is a typically Burtonesque heroine. With her blanched, beautiful face and rosebud lips, her long hair a tangle of curls, she looks like she has stepped out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting.

Her next move, of course, is to fall down the rabbit hole into a place called “Underland” (the term Underworld, presumably, having already been nabbed by the knicker factory in Coronation Street).

Burton uses every 3D trick in the palette to make the plunge spectacular. It’s an impressive start, but several rallies aside, the film never regains that initial sense that we are about to see a startling, original take on some of the most familiar scenes in children’s literature.

That’s the trouble with Alice: it is so well known. With at least 20 movie and television versions already in the can, going through the looking glass has become like venturing out on on a well-worn tourist trail.

On your right is the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry); on your left Tweedledee and Tweedledum (Matt Lucas); look straight ahead for the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, and be sure to visit the gift shop before you leave.

To avoid too much of a sense of deja Alice, Burton fleshes out the characters and beefs up the plot. He succeeds with Bonham Carter’s Red Queen, who in temperament is a mix between Blackadder’s Queenie and an angry wasp.

Whenever Bonham Carter is on the screen the film fizzes into life. She also bags the funniest lines. “I love a warm pig belly for my aching feet,” she says as the creature in question assumes footstool duty. It’s one of a few deliciously bizarre moments that hint at what Burton might have delivered throughout the film if the focus hadn’t been elsewhere.

On Johnny Depp, for instance, who manages to turn the Mad Hatter into the Maddening Prattler. When we first meet him he’s lisping in an upper-class English accent.

As the supposed complexities of his character reveal themselves, he lapses into a thick Scots brogue.

The amateur psychologists among the audience will see this division of tongues as a way of showing the character’s alter ego, his darker, more troubled, aggressive side.

Compounding the accent felony is a mop of ginger hair spilling out from his top hat. What might have seemed to the costume designers to be a winning piece of outlandishness will look, to most others, remarkably like a “CU Jimmy” wig.

It doesn’t end there. Giving Depp a run for his bawbies in the Scots accent stakes is Paul Whitehouse, playing the March Hare. Two mad characters with Scots accents. Should we take this personally?

More of an affront to the sensibilities is the way the story marches relentlessly on towards a showdown between Alice and the Jabberwocky, complete with lashings of CGI and Alice dressed up like a heroine from a computer game. From Pre-Raphaelite princess to Alice, Tomb Raider, it’s not a welcome shift.

Burton’s determination to keep moving the story towards a conclusion has the curious effect of slowing it down. Already familiar with the tale, we can now see where it’s heading, and all that’s left is to enjoy the parade of fabulous animals.

And they are fabulous, from a Cheshire Cat with fur like rippling silk, to a brave, trusty bloodhound (voiced by Timothy Spall) that every child will want as their own.

What’s missing is a towering sense of mystery or enchantment, the qualities which have graced Burton’s films from Edward Scissorhands on.

He has realised his vision of Alice’s adventures, but how one wishes he had thrown away the map more.

Click here for 3D screenings

Paul Greenwood's Review

The seventh collaboration between Johnny Depp and Tim Burton seems like a natural fit for the pair. Lewis Carroll's Victorian fairytale set in a phantasmagorical world is right up Burton's street, full of the kind of trappings he's always put into his films, and with Depp in a beefed up role as the Mad Hatter the signs were good.

Somewhat predictably though, it’s something of a disappointment, a crazed and chaotic mishmash of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass and Jabberwocky. But for all its Jubjub birds and vorpal swords, it ends up most resembling The Wizard of Oz, without coming anywhere close in terms of storytelling.

It begins with a prologue in which young Alice has nightmares about a magical land of dodos and blue caterpillars. Years later as a 19-year-old (played by Australian newcomer Mia Wasikowska) she’s miffed at having to take part in society functions, especially when she learns she’s to be engaged to the frightful Hamish.

She’s much too flighty and imaginative to be tied down and when she sees a rabbit in a waistcoat she gives chase and falls down a rabbit hole, finding herself in a strange world where its inhabitants wonder if she’s the real Alice, the one who visited them many years before.

The land is ruled by the tyrannical Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and the prophecy says that on the Frabjous Day, Alice will slay the Jabberwock and her sister the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) will once again wear the crown.

There’s some interest in the early parts of the film, with Alice’s tumble down the rabbit hole making good use of the 3D, but it’s a technology that makes everything so muddy. The main selling point is of course an unhinged Depp who, with an accent for some reason going between lisping English and broad Glaswegian, brings a dark madness to the tea party and much of what the Hatter does.

This gives way to a droopy midsection where there’s a lot of sitting about waiting for the plot to reignite. It’s all very madcap and anarchic, but it’s that very nuttiness that keeps you from getting a hold on just what exactly the plot is meant to be.

Blame Burton, a director who long ago sacrificed narrative coherence for visual extravagance. The design is breathtaking but there’s an overwhelming sense that it’s not much more than a selection of not especially well-connected sequences strung together with no great plan or reason.

Still, every character and actor is 100% believable and any fun that is to be had comes from the wonderful cast. Wasikowska is impressively feisty and sparky as Alice, Hathaway is hilariously fey and Bonham Carter channels Miranda Richardson’s Queen Elizabeth from Blackadder to amusing effect. Stephen Fry is suitably louche as the Cheshire Cat, and Matt Lucas looks scarily plausible as Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

But ultimately, like last year’s A Christmas Carol, you’ve got to think that Disney have made Alice in Wonderland not because of any burning desire to tell a good story, but because technology and commerce have intersected with an established property that will allow them to keep the box office tills ringing until Easter.