Film review: Alice in Wonderland

BY KARL QUINN

Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland is indeed a 3D presentation - dreary, derivative and way too dependent on Depp for its own good.

The excitement around the technology that may yet save Hollywood is all well and good, but the near-universal shrug of the shoulders that has greeted Burton's foray into the 3D form is a reminder of the importance of storytelling. This poor Alice, so richly stocked in trickery and frippery, is rather impoverished on that front.

The thing is, it starts well enough: the prologue invented by screenwriter Linda Woolverton is witty and feisty and surprising, attributes long and justifiably associated with the Lewis Carroll books from which the film is, more or less, derived - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is about to have her hand (and all the other bits) taken in marriage by Hamish (Leo Bill), an utterly appalling aristocrat, in order to merge the business empire created by her late father with the holdings of his inheritance. But Alice resists this marriage of old land and new money because, rather like the heroine of a Jane Austen novel, she wants to marry for the sake of feelings rather than her property portfolio.

Indeed, Aussie Mia - who was rather viciously and unfairly maligned by The News of the World as giving a horrendously flat performance ("She's not a heroine she looks like she's ON heroin" wrote the sensationalist Sunday tabloid's Robbie Collin) looks spookily like Gwyneth Paltrow as Emma in these early scenes. At any rate, she jilts him at the engagement altar and hares off to follow a rabbit that she alone has spied from the corner of her eye.

In these early scenes, the 3D effect is fairly muted. It's there, and it's slightly distracting - have you noticed how in 3D it sometimes looks as if the characters in the foreground have depth while the background is flat, almost like a bad cut-and-paste job? - but it's the story that is doing the work.

But the second we're down that rabbit hole, whoosh! It's a 3D bonanza. As I wrote last year, part of what makes Avatar so impressive is that James Cameron has by and large resisted the urge to show he's mastered every little trick in the 3D user's guide. Tim Burton, alas, shows no such restraint. Alice's tunnel drop is straight  from the iMax rollercoaster-ride manual; the rocks that appear to hurtle out of the screen could be asteroids from some 1950s sci-fi shocker; every fanciful critter that lunges towards us just makes this new ambit seem so very, very tired.

But let's be fair. A little over-enthusiasm for the new box of tricks is, perhaps, excusable. Burton's magic train is, after all, only the second to leave the station.

What's less excusable is the flatness of the story. OK, Carroll's books are episodic and Alice is more cypher than character, there to observe rather than act for the most part, and that makes them problematic properties for the screen. But Woolverton's script deals with these issues by putting Carroll through the Mythmaster 5000, and churning out yet another Joseph Campbell-approved* one-size-fits-all yawn (sorry, yarn) about a reluctant hero on a quest. If her feet were a bit bigger, Alice could just as easily be a hobbit.

As our ersatz heroine plods through the fantastical and yet, somehow, dreary landscape, we seem to be marking time until the Mad Hatter's appearance. But when he arrives, in the form of Johnny Depp in a bizarre Ronald McDonald wig, it's a shock. There's something the matter with the Hatter. Slowly it becomes obvious: he's traumatised, like so many Burton leading men before him.

The Burton-Depp creative relationship has thrown up some interesting contrivances - and Burton, a one-time animator, is above all a creator of cartoons - but here it feels like the director has given his muse his head, and he's only gone and run off with it. Yes, off with his head. It's a disaster.

Helena Bonham-Carter, at least, is good as the Red Queen, equal parts needy and nasty, but she alone can't save the film, which, when all is said and done, is OK but no better than that.

In a few short months it has become a commonplace to declare Avatar a "game changer". But let's not forget that while audiences fled the cinema in terror in 1895 when they first saw footage of a train coming towards them, they sat there contentedly the second time.

In other words, no matter how good the technology, you can only change the rules once. After that, it's all about how you play the game.

*Joseph Campbell studied mythologies from around the world and discerned in them common structures and tropes. His most famous book of comparative mythology, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949), has been adopted by Hollywood as a kind of template of storytelling.

- © Fairfax NZ News