ALICE IN WONDERLAND Post Release - Page 2

I almost took my kids to see this, but I just can't do it.

Is this something that might slightly amuse a 9 year old? From the descriptions it sounds like it might actually be a bit too scary and I rather my kids not think of this movie when Alice and Wonderland is brought up.

Just caught it with the family and I have to say, I don't get the hoopla either way. It felt like a slightly less endearing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (interesting visuals and a few solid performances), so opinions on that movie would probably be a good barometer for this one. I thought it was slow in parts, but I was fine with most of the characters (they nailed the Cheshire Cat), and the way they digitally manipulated the actors was an interesting choice. Ending felt completely flat though. All told, while it was probably worth the $5 matinee price, I never plan on seeing it again.

Horrible. Absolutely horrible. One might expect an Alice In Wonderland movie to be filled with, you know, awe and wonder, and the film is almost totally devoid of either. It's like Burton went out of his way to siphon all of the imagination out of this story for...well, shit, I couldn't even say what for. Some of the performances were entertaining enough (though I could have used more Rickman and Fry), but good God was Depp appalling. And nigh-ubiquitous.

I don't know. I could go on, there's just not much in the movie that's worth holding on to and championing.

Great review...I've read such conflicting opinions on if this is great or horrible. I'm still going to go see it though before I can render my own.

This movie was so bad that I really don't have many words for it. My girlfriend fell asleep during the show, which is something that has never happened before.

Not only is it boring, but the plot meanders through the basic beats while doing nothing to build up any kind of character. Ok, so apparently the mad hatter had a family that was killed by the Jabberwocky, and thats why he became a Mad Hatter, but its just a surface level characterization, at no point do we see anything about how the hatter became so loyal to the white queen (other than, presumably, that she gave him business). I could keep going, but whats the point? This movie was awful.

On the other hand, the Cheshire Cat and the Caterpillar were aces, and the girl who played Alice, while not having a whole lot to work with, was one of the only bright spots in an otherwise completely uninteresting film.

Hopefully Burton goes and makes a lower budget film with some actual imagination and he can right his shipwreck of a career.

I have been a Burton fan for a long time. I've often had to defend some of his shit to friends. There is no defending what I just saw. I walked out of there pissed at the lazy, shoddy, utterly absurd piece of dogshit that I had just beheld. There's no two ways around this. It was a horrible movie.

Everything that Devin talked about in his review is 100% correct. I usually disagree with him, but fuck, he was dead-on about this one, people. I was hoping that perhaps having an older Alice would add some sort of new spin onto the story. It adds NOTHING. NOTHING. There is no reason why this same exact lack-of-story couldn't have been told with a child. In fact, when you see the flashback of Alice as a kid in Wonderland, I saw in those ten seconds all of the awe and wonder that the rest of the film lacks completely. There's no heart, no soul, no fucking pulse here. The wonder is gone. This shit sucked. The whole back and forth of "is she the right Alice" got to be so fucking annoying. We all know she's the right fucking Alice, so when the reveal comes to her that she indeed is the right Alice, there's no big emotional payoff. I knew it, so I shrugged my shoulders. I just didn't care.

Every single actor in this film is SHIT, except for Stephen Fry's voice as the Cheshire Cat. The lead actress plays Alice as this monotone bore, which I thought worked initially. She's grown up, she's lost her spunk, and I was waiting for it to re-emerge. Never does. She's flat, has two facial expressions (confused and more confused), and makes for one lame-ass heroine. The whole thing with her being in the suit of armor and fighting the Jabberwocky was laughable. They try to cover their ass and explain away her fighting skills by saying that the sword is magical and all she has to do is hold it, but it doesn't fly. Also, as much buildup as that showdown got, that fight lasts for a minute tops and is constantly interrupted so that we can watch the fucking Mad Hatter have a swordfight. AWFUL AWFUL AWFUL. Helena Bonham Carter is just shitty and obnoxious in this, and anyone who says that she steals this movie is kidding themselves. Anne Hathaway is shit and has jack shit to do here. Same for Crispin Glover. And Johnny...oh Johnny. This is the worst performance of his career, bar NONE. It's not even a performance. I don't know what to call it. He's terrible in this, and that dance scene had my jaw on the floor. I cared for none of these characters, and didn't give a shit about their fates.

Things that do not need explaining are explained to death, and things that need explaining are passed by completely. I sure didn't know that the Cheshire Cat could take the forms of other beings, but he does just that to save the Hatter's life. Was this stated previously and I just fucking missed it or what? That came out of nowhere! I know that he can turn to mist or fog or whatever the fuck that was, and detach his head from his body, but they conveniently turn him into Mystique at a convenient time in the script when the scriptwriter is too fucking lazy to get out of the hole that she dug for herself, without even trying to explain it.

Not only is the movie shit, but it looks like shit. I saw this on an IMAX screen, and the 3-D here is incredibly blurry, especially during the fall down the rabbit hole. The 3-D is pretty lame and is barely perceptible in a lot of scenes.

And just when I thought that I couldn't get angrier, Burton goes and drops the damn windmill from Sleepy Hollow into the background for no fucking reason. It's just there. All of that shit from that Tim Burton video posted on the main page was here, down to the damn Danny Elfman music opening the film. I used to think of Burton as an auteur, someone with his own aesthetic style who stuck to it, critics be damned. I sort of admired him for that, and wondered why he got so much shit while a dude like Tarantino can include callbacks to previous films and follow a pattern of sorts without getting shit on. This movie made the answer painfully clear. Tarantino can tell a fucking story. Burton cannot. This movie fucking SUCKED.

ETA: Elfman needs to stop recycling his old scores. The first shot of the Red Queen's palace is accompanied by the soundtrack to The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Had a couple of friends who saw it and were disappointed (god knows why, at this point). Mostly, though, they were wondering if this kills the film adaptation of Looking Glass Wars, which I guess they were really hoping was going to get made.

What a piece of shit. For the entire running time, all I could think was "have these people actually READ Alice In Wonderland?" because it sure seems like they haven't.

Now that I've thought on it, I don't think the problem is that Alice is older. It's her lack of reaction to what is happening around her. Imagine the classic scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens the door and walks into Oz for the first time. Yes, the Technicolor looks great, but what always brings me to tears is the look on Dorothy's face, the shock and wonder and awe of being there and seeing things that she never imagined possible. In this flick, when Alice opens the door and walks into Wonderland, there is none of that on her face. She looks bored and confused. You can have as many special effects as you want, but it's up to the actor to SELL the moment. If she doesn't feel it, the audience isn't going to feel it, which is why I was so meh in that moment when I should have been awestruck. I don't know if she just doesn't have the goods to sell it, or if that was Burton's direction, but Alice's strange reactions floored me on multiple occasions.

I was really stunned that she was so riled up and ready to go save the Hatter when he's captured by the river, even though she kept bitching about how everything was "her dream" and she'd wake up soon. If she's so convinced that it's not real, why is she upset when he's taken? Even if you make the argument that she's realizing that things are real at this point, she just met this guy, he rambles incoherently for a few minutes, and all of a sudden she's acting like her best fucking friend just got taken away and she has to ride to the castle to save him. Very strange. They tried to manufacture some sort of friendship between these two that I never bought for a second.

All of my initial impressions seem to be correct. Tim Burton hasn't been a director so much as a mediocre production designer for ages now. I'm sure, however, his truly hardcore fanbase will lurrrrrve this, the delusional fanboys, the badly aging gothy types and musical theater nerds who blather on about "dark whimsy" and such.

Congratulations, Tim Burton. You've made your Hook.

Lifeless, obvious, lazy, dreary. Ugh.

But hey, at least I got to see Alice in Wonderland fight Fing Fang Foom.

I would pay good money to see Christian Bale punch this Mad Hatter into a bloody pulp. Make it happen, Nolan.

And what exactly did Christopher Lee's two whole lines of dialog as the Jabberwock really add to things?

Oh, and the poem is "Jabberwocky". The monster is the Jabberwock. Get it right.

Lotsa pointless voice overs. Imelda Staunton as the flowers, Michael Gough as the blue dodo.

Have to admit, though, I kinda loved Fry's Cheshire cat.

I actually liked most everything about the Cheshire cat. The voice, the design, the ethereal way in which it moves and disappears. That was the one part of the film that I felt they got right.

He was probably teleporting over to a better movie between appearances.

The worst sin this film commits is that it is so boring. I also found the brief flashback sequence Alice has to her first trip to Underland (ugh, really? We have to change the name of the place too?) to be far more interesting to me than the rest of the story combined. And I already know that story.

Maybe someone could answer two questions that didn't seem to make any sense to me, or maybe I missed something.

1. Why was everyone in the Queen of Hearts court wearing prosthetics? I assume the queen is self-conscious of her head, but didn't nothing anything in the story to suggest that.

2. Why did the entire card army turn on the Queen once the Jabberwock was dead? Did she use him to reign with terror? Also, didn't get that impression from the script. It seemed the only time he was let out was to terrorize the White Queen's followers.

All that said, the Cheshire Cat was aces. The only good thing about the film.

I loved how his pupils kept dilating as he spoke.

My favorite character hands down was Stephen Fry's The Cheshire Cat. I love the dissolving effect, and all those teeth looked pretty awesome. Plus, Stephen's voice for the character was spot on.

I had no desire to see Alice, but I was curious to see if it was as big of a train wreck as discussed. I didn't get a train wreck, though. I just got incredibly bored.

They stopped because the battle was to be decided between Alice and the Jabberwock. Once he was dead, the card army adhered to the rules of war and followed the White Queen.

Matinee, packed house*. Applause at the end. Ugh. I'm completely baffled, because this was stupendously unfunny and unfun.

The CGI wizards and animators should be very proud of themselves.

Hathaway, Fry, Rickman, Sheen, even Helena Bonham Carter and Wasikowska I think can feel satisfied with their work here.

Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, and especially Linda Woolverton should be very, very ashamed.

What a terrible story, what horrible ideas, such a pointless shabby-ing of classic literary characters. And fucking boring! That was the worst of it. Ugh, ugh, ugh.

*I swear I first typed "hearse".

IMHO, incredibly boring qualifies as a train wreck.

Maybe someone has asked this already, but why didn't they just call it Alice in Underland?

What was the purpose of calling it Underland, by the way? Seriously, what was the point of that? It added nothing to the film, so why would they change it? Shit, that was stupid.

It helps them justify the lack of Wonder.

So I have still haven't seen this, but I'm bemused by the vehement reviews vs. the great box office this film is doing. Is it just a case of good Marketing? Johnny Depp? Something else?

It's underground. Get it?

My 2 cents

Back in the late 80's & early 90's I always got excited with news of a new Tim Burton film. I'm sad to say, or admit, that now 20 years later I'll never see another Tim Burton movie again. The guy has seriously lost the plot. What a bad, bad fucking movie.

After reading this and Devin's review, a thought struck me: How many people, nowadays, have actually either:

A family friendly visual smorgasbord based on perennial classic characters, employing the hot 3D novelty gimmick of the moment, featuring a huge star engaging in the kind of whimsical hijinks that have resulted in gigantic world conquering hits numerous times in the recent past. Gosh how could something like that possibly be a commercial success? Can someone please connect the dots for me here? I just don't understand it...

Verily, verily. I've heard from two people how "great" this movie is...but both are sources whose opinions I generally use as opposite barometers for ticket-buying decisions: if they love the movie, I know to steer clear.

That, plus Devin's and some other trusted sources reviews, make this a movie I'll avoid completely.

I keep wondering why Burton didn't simply do an adaptation of "Jabberwocky"* and jettison all the Alice stuff.

*The poem, not the Gilliam film. Whose Jabberwock was far more interesting and scary than the one in Burton's film.

Those who complained about UNDERLAND...
this is a cover of the original manuscript from 1864




I saw it this weekend in a small cozy cinema that still somehow has 3D (although the active shutter glasses) and it was okish.

Didnt feel the eyepoking effects like the dancing birds were good and I would've loved for more parallel connections between Alice's dreamworld and reality but I guess the original story isn't exactly a good example of intricate parallel storytelling.

See, I thought Burton fairly beat us over the head with them. Oh look, those two girls are Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. Oh look, there's a giant fucking CATERPILLAR crawling on her fiance. WE GET IT.

I fucking HATED that opening pre-Wonderland stuff. At least in the dream world BUrton had his design work - the real word scenes are so horribly uninspired and across-the-board lazy that they make what follows seem like A NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS.

It was a bad idea then and it was soon corrected. So what's your point?
You know, Alice falls through a rabbit hole so maybe Burton should have called the place RabbitholeLand. You know, because that word is in the original text.

That makes sense I guess, but then why did the cards and chess pieces even start fighting? Why not just put Alice and the Jabberwork into the Thunderdome and let them decide the ruler of Underland that way?

I know it seems like nitpicking, but there were just so many little things that were pointless and unexplained. The whole script felt like some bad fan fiction written by a 13 year old.

It's a weird nitpick, because they explicitly show that the only reason the large-scale fight erupts is because the Hatter interfered, which the Red Queen sees as cheating.

You're right. I forgot about that. Still doesn't explain the other problem I have though. Thanks for the reminder.

I really loved how Alice told all the guests at the party back home at the end exactly what they needed/deserved to be told in as matter-of-fact and as on-the-nose a manner of saying it as she could possibly say it.

And by “loved” I mean “wishing I stood home and watched Angel Heart for the 80th time instead”.

I loved that she told the cheating brother-in-law that she'd be watching him closely, then proceeded to get on a ship and sail off to God knows where.

Luckily I didn't pay to see this, but it's still not worth seeing for free. This movie is a turgid piece of crap. The visuals are fantastic and I LOVED the Cheshire Cat, the Caterpillar and the White Queen...but as an actual narrative film, or any kind of film for that matter, it fails and fails badly.

Honestly, all this movie is, is a reel for the effects house(s) that worked on it.

Ha ha. Yeah, there's that too.

Ah, but if we just go on about the "back in the regular world" epilogue aspect of the third act, we then overlook the Hatter's victory dance (whatever the fuck it was called), a moment which can never, ever, ever possibly be ripped on and snarked on enough by anyone as far as I'm concerned. That one moment was probably the all time lowest moment of Depp's career that I can possibly think of since... since ever pretty much.

I still can't believe that this came from the same actor/director duo that gave us Ed Wood and Edward Scissorhands (hell, I’ll even throw love to Sleepy Hollow and Sweeney Todd, fuck what anyone else thinks). Christ, the phrase "how the mighty have fallen" was practically invented for moments like this one.

The whole movie ranges anywhere from blah to kinda watchable to just downright awful, but the last bulk in particular is absolutely cringe worthy in every possible way that only the absolute worst and most insipid mainstream family movies can be.

I mean yeah, Alice looked kinda cool in that suit of battle armor, and a few of the visuals for the Jabberwocky battle were pretty damn good... but this of course is negated by the fact that this is Alice in fucking Wonderland that we're talking about here and a sentence like "Alice looked cool in that battle armor" and “jabberwocky battle” should never have to come out of anyone's mouth in relation to what's supposed to be a fairly straight(ish) adaptation of the story.

I know my share of guys who are D&D/Lord of the Rings dorks who are the kind of people who nut themselves to anything that has to do with anything that’s even vaguely medieval/Tolkien/sword and sorcery-ish, and who try to apply all of those tropes as well dice-rolling-RPG-stat bullshit to pretty much anything and everything that they can possibly think of to ascribe all that crap onto, regardless of how ill-fitting it may be.

I'm not kidding when I say that those guys would probably get a kick out of this movie and maybe even outright love it unironically; specifically because of its attempts to LOTR-ize Wonderland. As a lover of most things Alice and Carroll, it’s for that reason that I seriously wish I could somehow cram all their RPG source books up their collective asses.

I can get behind the Cheshire Cat love though definitely. Fry’s voice work is indeed a highlight.

If you told be back in the 90’s that Burton would be tackling a live action Alice in Wonderland film, I’d have told you with full confidence that it’d be a sure-fire grand slam, no contest, no questions asked, and absolutely no hesitation in saying so. That I’d be so, so wrong isn’t even the most dispiriting part; it’s WHY I’d have been wrong that’s the real killjoy. This movie takes everything that made Charlie and the Chocolate Factory so middling and just amplifies it all to ludicrous proportions, while inventing a few brand new issues all its own.

Still, not to sound like an apologist for Burton, but a fair share of the blame MUST be laid at Linda Woolverton’s feet. The screenplay for this is absolute garbage for the most part, and much of what’s wrong with the film is in no small part due to it, and squarely so.

In spite of this though, Burton is an A-list director and has been for a very long time now; he’s more than got the pull and the power in Hollywood to have gotten the whole script overhauled completely should he have chosen to do so, and its ultimately just as much his fault that he didn’t bother to. Either he didn’t recognize the script as the utter dross that it is, or he saw that it sucked but just ultimately didn’t give a crap enough to make some noise about it. Or perhaps maybe it was a little from column A, and a little from column B. Either way, that’s pretty fucking sad. And telling.

I know that Burton has always had his detractors since pretty much day 1, but in my opinion the man was once indeed a real Artist (capital A) and was among my all time favorite filmmakers; in terms of evoking that whole “awe inspiring sense of childhood wonder” thing, he was far more to my taste growing up than someone like Steven Spielberg sometimes tended to be in that whole department. Ask me to pick between E.T. and either Beatlejuice or Scissorhands, and both Beatlejuice and Scissorhands win hands down, no room for debate. I don’t give a fuck how “wrong” that makes me in the eyes of other film-nerds. Hell, I’ll even throw Batman Returns up against it.

But to see Burton now reduced to more or less a shill for Hot Topic (and Disney now apparently as well) is just soul-crushingly depressing.

Between this and Eddie Murphy’s career (along with god knows how many other examples I can’t bring to mind right now), it’s enough to make me never EVER want to have kids, out of fear that something about the experience of fatherhood evidently makes all of ones sensibilities just wilt and decompose into supreme and immense lameness.

I'm fairly sure they were referring specifically to the Red Queen Of Hearts dominion when they talked about "Underland" - all her scorched out bullshit, not the entire world.

Also, the prosthetics thing was pretty clearly set-up and payed-off as her sycophants winning favor with the Queen who is proud of her large head despite being made fun of.

All that said- what a giant piece of shit. The first thing I thought when the credits rolled were, "Wait, the theater yanked the fucking TRON trailer off of this print!"

I could give less of a fuck if they wanted to use the Wonderland U as a playground for LOTR style adventures, but the slavish adherence to the character introductions and retarded "2nd visit" nonsense kills even that approach. What makes this movie not function is that there is no worthwhile emotional connection, arc, or development for Alice or her cohorts. Shit ain't got no heart.

Or rather, people who appreciate movies and people who watch movies are usually two vastly different types of people.

(that is to say, I'm not a critic by any means, but I can generally discern between garbage and something worthwhile. the bulk of the people buying tickets couldn't give a flying fish either way - they're in it for the diversion)

I am so sick of prophecy bullshit. Lazy, lazy device (and yet, a fan of Lost). Visually great, but god damn, what did Alice actually do? Oh, and did her wound knock people out or something? I remember Twisp and the dog thing passing out at the sight and/or smell.

Yeah, you get Stephen Fry's voice and a cat purring, two of my favourite sounds ever. I'd buy a CD of a few hour's worth of that.

Won't repeat the gripes that everyone else has already mentioned - this is a travesty through and through.

Towards the end my stance was "ok, so you're making Alice into a LOTR type scenario - with everything that's so obviously wrong about that idea, at least give me a huge fuck off scary dragon". And then that feeble tiny Jabberwock shows up. Look at the size relations in the illustration - the Jabberwock's supposed to be HUGE. Didn't want to scare kids, I guess, but this really called for a dragon from Sleeping Beauty type thing.

All the best to Alice getting chinamen hooked on opium in her future adventures!

Anyone remember me saying in the Addams Family thread how I haven't hated a Burton film from Big Fish onward?

We've reached checkpoint #2.

Fuck this film. For every reason stated.
Just to combine these two points, in theory, you have two of my favorite things in the Jabberwock: dragons and Christopher Lee's voice. We get a dragon the size of Scooby Doo, and ONE LINE out of Christopher Lee. Unfuckingforgiveable.

Also, for fuck's sake, Chris, you turned down Zeus in God of War 3 for THIS?

I like to think Lee is focused on the Charlemange concept album right now and everything else is just a paycheck.