I’m not going to be doing another 4 horror films for Halloween, you want a horror show, you can just look at the latest news or your twitter feed for that. I will still be covering season 3 of Stranger Things and have a Halloween special but for the most part, I’m going to be doing something else.
Disney live action remakes have been a part of society since the 101 Dalmatians remake, but it was 2010 with the release of Alice in Wonderland where it was shown they could make big money, resulting in a slew of remakes and oh my god, Disney, make it stop.
I’m not gonna be covering the 101
Dalmatians remake at this time, but I will be covering all the Disney Live
Action remakes of the 2010’s. Oh boy, this is gonna be a rough ride.
We start with… oh f*ck, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. OK, to Burton’s credit, he’s not a bad director. For all the problems I have with the Michael Keaton Batman run, it certainly captured the gothic look I’d expect of a gritty adaptation of the Dark Knight, Beetlejuice was weird but fun and I did like Mrs Peregrine’s home for Peculiar Children but oh man is he the wrong choice for this particular aesthetic.
Tim Burton’s style is dark and
gritty. Wonderland is a place of magic, colour and madness, only one of those
really appeals to Burton. As for the original, and I mean the Disney original,
not the book… It’s fine, it’s not really my thing, I prefer a story with a bit
more meat to it, but I understand why that isn’t the case here, unlike some
people, which I’ll get to in a bit. It feels like a 20-minute short, stretched
out to 75 minutes. And if that’s what I think of the original, imagine what I
think of the nearly 2-hour long remake, let’s take a look.
Alice now has to deal with the
grief of her dead father and I’m just gonna keep a count of how many dead
parents are acknowledged/added in the remakes and not in the original. Because
it’s a fairly high number.
She’s been aged and this is a decision that strikes me as odd for a number of reasons, but her being distracted by a white rabbit and being curious enough to chase after it is something a child would do, her doing so as an adult like she may have some serious issues. Her story in the ‘real’ world is that she’s an ahead of her times cliché that is being proposed to by a ponce named Hamish who she doesn’t love. Yup, that old chestnut.
I don’t think I can go to long in saying that Mia Wasikowska’s acting in this is just terrible. She goes through every scene giving the blandest delivery and I can only imagine Burton was the one behind it. She won awards for her performance here, just think about that.
Anyway, she ends up in Wonderland, or as this film wants to call it, Underland, why? And it’s been turned into a dystopian nightmare where all the colours are muted and everything’s covered in fog and… WHY?
OK, so they have decided to incorporate a story into this. WHY?!! To do a narrative with this concept, they chose to introduce rules and logic in a realm that’s biggest draw that it doesn’t follow rules and logic. The biggest offender in this regard is the stupid prophecy scroll that tells of each and every day. There are a lot of flaws in prophecy stories as they are, but not only does this establish a series of rules that need to be followed, but also opens up a massive plot-hole because if they have a scroll that tells them the future, how did they not see the Red Queen’s dominion coming?
The plot in a Wonderland is normally a reflection of the psyche of the character. In the animated film, it was about her learning the need for logic and structure by visiting what a world could be like without it. Various adaptations use Wonderland as a backdrop for a wacky adventure tangentially related to a decision/character arc in the real world. The thing is, Alice really has no character development, she’s bland and ahead of her times at the beginning and is pretty much the same at the end.
And I know this is a nitpick but it irritates me, it’s Jabberwock, Jabberwocky is the name of the poem. Now, I would mind this less if they didn’t recite the goddamn poem in the film, so they must’ve realised this.
I’m going to go too deeply into the machinations of the plot. It’s morose, it makes no sense even taking into account the eccentricities of Wonderland, sorry Underland and it’s so incredibly tedious. There are flashes of the right ideas sprinkled in, the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter, of course) playing croquet with a flamingo and a porcupine is accurate, and her ordering beheadings on literally any offence. Alice’s size varies throughout the film based on her eating various things, The Raven and the Writing Desk ‘riddle’ seems right and the Tweedledee and Tweedledum have the occasion comedic weirdness that is in-keeping with what Wonderland is.
So, the Mad Hatter, I swear I
should count his dead family in my list of dead parents, in fact…
Oh, so it was his PTSD that drove him mad, that makes so much sense… Why do we want things to make sense? This is wonderland! It’s not like the March Hare has a traumatic backstory. The Mad Hatter is played by Johnny Depp who just seems to flip-flop between accents every 5 seconds, it’s really distracting. The Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry) claims not to get involved with politics, except for the several occasions we do see him get involved.
I suppose the one that comes out the best from all this is Absolom (played by the late Alan Rickman) his attitude is bit more down to business than in the original but him smoking a pipe, asking Alice who she is and eventually transforming seem in-keeping with his character.
The White Queen (Anne Hathaway) is bland, the sequel would go into exploring the dynamic between the White and Red Queen but it’s an avenue only hinted at here.
Alice in Wonderland is not a good remake. It completely misses the spirit of the original, and the book they’re both allegedly based on. With their war time plot, and prophetic machinations, they add rules to a world that thrives on not having rules. Not only that but with the prophecy laid out, things become predictable and time up to climax becomes a slog.
Rating 35/100
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