It seems like ages ago that Tim Burton first announced he would be making a live action film based on Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland,” and now the movie is finally hitting theaters everywhere on Friday.  The potential of a combination of this much-loved (and very bizarre) fairy tale and Burton’s talent for creating things equally whimsical and weird seemed like a sure-fire classic in the making… however, sometimes things don’t turn out as good as they look on paper.

By no means is the new Alice in Wonderland a terrible movie—it’s not unwatchably bad by any stretch of the imagination, and some parts work so well it’s almost possible to overlook the shortcomings of the film as a whole.  What’s great are the visual effects, which blend CGI with live action seamlessly.  Of course, maybe this is actually more a case of blending live action with CGI, since 95% of the Wonderland Burton created, and most of its residents, are fully computer-generated.  The character designs are appropriately odd and are actually more of a departure from Burton’s typical “gothic fairy tale” motif than anything he’s made before.  Gone are Burton’s trademark obsessions with stark black and white set pieces and drastic edges and stripes and spirals, and in their place we see some new fetishes (such as giant eyes and a weird running gag involving disrobing Alice) and very lush, but never vibrant, settings for the story.

I would say this is the biggest problem of the film—the character designs are solid, the quality of the effects excellent, and the story (which is actually a quasi-sequel to Carroll’s original) is mostly good, but something about the entire affair seems to be missing the whimsy of the original books, as well as the manic energy of Disney’s animated Alice.  Instead of the uncontrollably bright and fantastic Wonderland we’ve come to expect, Burton takes more cues from Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” and the Narnia movies,  so much so that all I could think while watching the final act of Alice was “since when has Tim Burton wanted to make a Tolkein movie so bad?”  The swords, armor, gruesome monsters and murky, dark and dilapidated sets worked amazingly well for the Hobbitt’s adventures, but don’t translate as well for Alice.  Instead of grounding the film in realism it makes the world that should be fantastic seem banal and dreary. This concept is shoehorned into the plot—Wonderland is not the place it used to be—but it feels forced, especially with so many characters showing up only for what are basically extended cameos, so they can say or do what they did in the classic story, and then leave or fade into the background.

Not a cameo, obviously, is Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter.  Both he and Mia Wasikowska (who plays Alice) give particularly good performances, and both are quite adept at naturally acting along with the CGI creatures.  But while I love Depp, and will readily admit that he works wonders with what he is given here, the idea of the Hatter being a character this integral to the plot of the story again seems forced and unbelievable.  Alice’s adventures in Wonderland were traditionally more episodic, encountering various characters at different times, and it helped this fantasy world seem bigger—here, these characters clearly all know each other and everyone basically comes together at the end to participate in the huge sweeping final battle for Wonderland.  It all feels very forced, despite looking pretty, and in the end even after the heroes are victorious there still just doesn’t seem to be much life in this Wonderland. 

I don’t want to sound overly critical of the movie, as I said it’s certainly not terrible. The kids in the audience seemed to love it, and it’s not boring for the adults.  But if you go back and watch the earlier Burton movies, which sadly seem today as though they may have been the peak of his creative career, you can’t help but consider how the Wonderland he would have made back then would be full of so much more wonder.