“Go ask Alice; I think she’ll know. When logic — and proportion — have fallen sloppy dead, and the White Knight is talking backwards, and the Red Queen’s ‘off with her head’… remember what the Dormouse said: Keep your head. Keep your head.”
So go the immortal lyrics of Jefferson Airplane’s song, and they’ve seldom been more appropriate than they are when considering Tim Burton’s latest cinematic effort. Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a bewildering catastrophe of a movie, but not an entirely disappointing one. He has wholly failed to make a film that is a faithful adaptation of the works that inspired it, but we might take solace in the fact that this was never really his intention. He, and screenwriter Linda Woolverton, who necessarily bears a great deal of the blame, have set out to write a sort of pseudo-sequel to the established Aliceian canon, and the results are not perfect. Not perfect at all. (5/10)
I review this film not because it was interesting (it wasn’t), nor even interestingly bad (it wasn’t that, either), but rather in fulfillment of this blog’s unspoken mandate, which is apparently “Mostly Victorian, Most of the Time.”
