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Alice in Wonderland Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG (for fantasy action/violence involving scary images and situations, and for a smoking caterpillar) Genre: Action, Fantasy Theater release: March 05, 2010 by Walt Disney Pictures Directed by: Tim Burton Runtime: 1 hour 48 minutes Cast: Johnny Depp (Mad Hatter), Mia Wasikowska (Alice), Helena Bonham Carter (Red Queen), Anne Hathaway (White Queen), Crispin Glover (Stayne/Knave of Hearts) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

This is not your grandmother's Alice. Though the title is the same, director Tim Burton did not film a new version of the classic novels by British clergyman and logician Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. Instead, Burton and screenwriter Linda Woolverton have moved the action forward 13 years. Now Alice, almost 20, is attending a garden party where the unappealing son of a local lord intends to propose marriage. Fleeing him, and pursuing a white rabbit, Alice kneels at the base of a tree and peers down an immense hole. Then she falls in.

The seemingly-endless falling is well-executed, as Alice dodges various objects, including a grand piano. She lands upside-down on a ceiling, her hair standing on end. She falls to the floor and discovers she is in a small, round room—a dingy and decaying room, subtly ominous—and tries each of the doors that ring it. As in the book, she discovers a door that is too tiny for her to exit and drinks a shrinking potion; then discovers she has forgotten the key on the glass tabletop and nibbles a growing-cake to retrieve it; then drinks the potion to shrink again, and at last passes through the door. This entire sequence is excellent, though there is the one curious element that Alice's clothes do not shrink and grow with her, a convenience usually employed in such scenes. Instead, her clothing has to be adjusted each time, a problem which may occupy some viewers' thoughts more than is strictly necessary.

Mia Wasikowska as Alice

On the other side of the door Alice immediately runs into a crowd of odd figures—a Dormouse, Dodo bird, Blue Caterpillar, and the Tweedles—who launch into an absurd discussion of whether this is or is not the "right Alice." Their bickering conversation is worthy of Carroll.

But with that I'm nearing the limit of what I can praise. It turns out that Wonderland has been waiting for Alice to return, because it is prophesied that she will slay the Jabberwocky and restore the White Queen to her rightful throne, and free the citizens from the wicked Red Queen. Yes, the film turns into an action movie, with a now overly-familiar CGI battle sequence at the end. Alice even has to get into a suit of armor and fight the dragon-beast with a sword. The original Alice stories are odd, strange, unsettling, dreamlike, and wholly unpredictable; "Lord of the Rings with a Girl" is as predictable as they come.

It's even worse, though. The Wonderland adventures are framed with another story. In the opening scene, we see a group of Victorian men debating international trade. (Huh?) When Alice, age 6, comes in to report a bad dream, her dad kindly puts her to bed again. She asks if her strange dreams mean she has "gone round the bend." Dad smiles and says yes, "You're bonkers—but the best people are."

(This theme of it being a grand thing to be mentally ill is reinforced over and over. It doesn't seem to have done the Mad Hatter [Johnny Depp] much good, though. And Alice's Aunt Imogen, who delusionally thinks she is engaged to a prince, is not allowed to continue her comforting fantasy; Alice informs her flatly, "There is no prince.")

Johnny Depp as The Mad Hatter

At the movie's end, Alice re-emerges at the garden party, refuses the young man's hand, and then speaks to his father—one of her dad's partners of old, it turns out, and now owner of the company. She talks of the thrill of international trading, and stresses particularly the opportunity to be the first to initiate trade with China. The lord is impressed, and invites her to be his apprentice. In the final sequence we see Alice standing nobly on the deck of a ship, heading out to the open sea.

This is wrong on so many counts it's hard to know where to start. It's a dud, dramatically, to go from multicolored Wonderland to the world of business planning. It's hard to picture capitalism as the ideal calling for the girl who fell down a rabbit hole. And were those 19th century international corporations really so admirable? In the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Depp's character fights against exactly the same type of business that Alice champions here.

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