Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, adapted by Linda Woolverton, and starring Mia Wasikowska (Alice), Johnny Depp (the Mad Hatter), Anne Hathaway (the White Queen), and Helena Bonham Carter (above, as the Red Queen, and looking quite a bit like Silvana Mangano in Dune), opens today in the United States and several other countries. The costly 2D-turned-3D fantasy has had some distribution problems in Europe thanks to Disney's decision to release it on DVD in less than the usual four-month window. (One report claims Alice in Wonderland cost $250 million, but it's hard to know who to believe. Avatar's production costs, for instance, have ranged between $180-$500 million, depending on who is doing the reporting.)
Critical reaction, for its part, has been mixed. Some really liked the movie; others really thought Lewis Carroll deserved better.
"Into the dark you tumble in Alice in Wonderland," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, "Tim Burton’s busy, garish and periodically amusing repo of the Lewis Carroll hallucination Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It’s a long fall turned long haul, despite the Burtonian flourishes … Played by Mia Wasikowska, Alice looks a touch dazed: she seems to have left her pulse above ground when she fell down the rabbit hole of Mr. Burton’s imagination."
"Is there a better movie-match than Lewis Carroll and Tim Burton?" (rhetorically) asks Anne Hornaday in the Washington Post. "With Alice in Wonderland, his boldly revisionist remix of Carroll's beloved tales of a young girl's journey down a rabbit hole and through a looking glass, Burton finely balances excess and restraint to create an absorbing, visually rich world of his very own."
"As the tantrum-prone Red Queen saddled with a basketball-sized noggin, Helena Bonham Carter does for Alice in Wonderland what Depp achieved as swaggering Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean — making an average movie better, …" says Randy Myers in the San Jose Mercury News. That nothing in her real-life partner Tim Burton's 3-D tinkering of the Lewis Carroll adventures — rumored to have cost $250 million — matches her isn't an outright slam of the film or of Burton. The Sweeney Todd actress is such a force here that she could make James Cameron's more visually impressive Pandora wilt in the background."
"Alice in Wonderland? It doesn't look like any Alice I know," says Amy Biancolli in the San Francisco Chronicle. "It has action scenes. Traumatic flashbacks. Heartfelt bonding between Alice and the Mad Hatter, whose gimongous lime-green eyes swell with emotion. There's even a scene where Alice gets hit on by the Knave of Hearts, one of the skeevier conceits in this fumbled Disney update." Biancolli adds that all director Burton and screenwriter Woolverton have accomplished is "a 3-D, CG-enhanced extravaganza of boring and time-worn fantasy conventions."
Photo: Disney Enterprises
OK, it's kind of boring, and it doesn't reflect the book, but t is titled "TIM BURTON'S Alice", so you're gonna get the burton version….
Saw it last night in IMAX in LA. The audience cheered and loved it. I loved it too, great visuals and Depp was fab as the hatter. NO EYE STRAIN in Imax.