Review: Alice in Wonderland

Let's face it: Tim Burton was born to remake Alice in Wonderland. With his flair for dark, wonky visuals and affection for eccentrics like Ed Wood and Willy Wonka, you could say the director has been going down the rabbit hole his entire career.

Tim Burton'simagination is given free rein, and he creates a bizarro world populated by giant mushrooms and all manner of strange beasties.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Disney, the studio responsible for this 3-D update, which fuses elements of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass with a more modern, feminist storyline provided by Beauty and the Beast scribe Linda Woolverton.

Following a brief childhood scene at outset, Woolverton flash-forwards to several years later. Now 19, Alice (an impressive Mia Wasikowska) is at a stuffy garden party, where a dull, chinless suitor with bad digestion is set to propose. None too jazzed at the prospect, this imaginative spitfire ditches the aristocratic revelers the instant a White Rabbit (Michael Sheen) presents an escape route.

Alice is far happier slumming in Wonderland (or "Underland," as it's called here), and clearly Burton is, too. His vivid imagination is given free rein, and he creates a breathtaking, bizarro world, populated by giant, multi-coloured mushrooms and all manner of strange beasties. Navigating her murky new surroundings, Alice crosses paths with a gallery of misfits that includes Tweedledum and Tweedledee (Matt Lucas), a hookah-smoking caterpillar (Alan Rickman) and a funky Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), who hangs suspended in mid-air, flicking his striped tail and blinking at the girl with his fantastic marble eyes.

These fleeting encounters are a build-up to the moment when Alice happens upon that infamous tea party, presided over by the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp, going for broke, as always). Prancing about the table in an electric-orange fright wig and pancake makeup, the Hatter seems convinced that his guest is the Alice, long ago predicted to become the one who would free Wonderland from the clutches of the evil Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter).

Burton's a visual storyteller first and foremost, and his tea party is rendered with all the dark flourishes he's known for. Set against a sooty, smudged backdrop of gnarled black trees, there's something sadly beautiful about the gathering. The high-strung March Hare, giddy Dormouse and stark-raving bonkers Mad Hatter look ashen, as if they've been sitting in this clearing for years, quietly decaying while carrying on the same nonsensical conversation in a loop.

This visual sumptuousness reaches its peak as Alice approaches the Red Queen's palace, a gothy hall of horrors surrounded by a moat filled with enormous, bobbing human heads. The film's wildly uneven 3-D which often consists of CGI creatures galumphing towards the screen settles down in these scenes, morphing into something more subtle, where depth-of-field is skewed slightly to create a woozy feeling that fits with the story's hallucinogenic vibe.

Inside the fortress, the Red Queen stomps across checkerboard floors in a perpetual tantrum. She's a snotty, narcissistic hoot, and Alice in Wonderland's best moments (and lines) can be found in her pouty freakouts, while her terrified frog attendants look on. In a movie that lets most of its performers down including Depp, who needs to return to live-action weirdness Bonham Carter strikes all the right notes. The performance is as large as the Queen's bulbous head.

But just when Bonham Carter starts bringing the proceedings to a level that's delightfully nuts, the script intrudes with reminders that young Alice is really on a journey of self-discovery, one in which she will finally become assertive enough to announce "I make the path." Normally, I welcome a girl-power slant in any big-budget Hollywood movie, but it feels ill placed here, and Alice is never more one-dimensional than when she's marching towards the movie's soulless, noisy climactic battle scene. Wonderland is at war, all right, and by the time an inoffensive Avril Lavigne track plays at film's close, it appears that Disney has won.

Alice in Wonderland opens March 5.

Lee Ferguson writes about the arts for CBC News.