Alice and Boring Land

Now I’m not a huge Lewis Carroll Fan, I loved both books when I read them, but that was when I was like, 10. And I admit to being something of a Tim Burton fan, I liked his early work like Beatle Juice, but his recent stuff turned me off (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory=eww). However, this seems to be his thing, its Alice and Wonderland, total nonsense fantasy, with crazy weirdness about the human subconscious and society, that he could exploit with his own weird artist/nonconformist angle and make something great, so I high expectations. What I didn’t expect was how boring it was. Instead of a surreal world of clever metaphors and a world that challenges my expectations of reality, I got a Fantasy action movie, with this really forced feminist message. Alice goes back to “Underland” in order to escape the most stereotypical view of English society you could imagine, to fall down the 3-D rabbit hole. The problem with this movie is they made it an action movie? Why? This is Tim Burton, he supposedly the nonconformist artistic guy, why was this film so formulaic? The image of Alice in a suit of armor just seems weirdly perverse, its like Calvin and Hobbes not being awesome, its just disturbing. It also departs from the whole idea of the story, I mean, why did this movie have a plot? The plot of Alice was this nonsensical surreal nonsense fantasy, with random stuff happening and lots of logic twists abound. With a plot, the world just seems…small. The Mad Hatter, despite his constant hogging of screen time, was actually less important in this version, because he was just a tool in a cold war, while in the book he was just another random weird creature, like the White Knight or the Duchess. Or the Cheshire Cat who was this sort of omnipresent jerk who was only interested in self amusement, while in the movie he is just a weird player for one side. Why didn’t he just vanish and kill the Red Queen than hang around like a git? This took the insane world, what was mysterious and huge and made it seem small and limited, as everything existed only in the context of this unreasonable war. Also by making this story about Good and Evil seems counterproductive, because in the book it was about law vs. order, as non of the kings and queens were really good or evil, just various levels of insane. By making it good and evil makes it seem simplistic, while in the book she is more like a normal person caught between two natural destructive forces. On that the whole idea was ruined more by the idea of fate, the prophecy was absolutely right and that robs Alice of the all important Free Will. On that, if the story is about standing up for yourself and doing what you want, why does she give in and kill the Jabbywalk (Not Jabbywalky, that’s the name of the poem “Have you slain the Jabbywalk my son”). Beyond that, it was just tedious, they basically repeat the Alice Growing/shrinking scene exactly as it was in the book, but as this is intended to be a sequel then we’ve seen it before, its just redundant. There are no surprises in this film, you can see everything coming from a mile away, and its mostly just waiting for the film to go through the motions you’ve predicted ten mins earlier. Last three points. A) Ok, guys, Queen of Hearts=cards, Red Queen=Chess. You can’t have a card queen fighting a chess queen, it doesn’t make any sense. I mean, I would complain about how in the books the White Queen was an evil sociopath as well and the Red Queen was just cold (oh wait I just did) but this really just boils down to they just didn’t care. They just didn’t care…B)What was the point of Johnny D? His character wasn’t special in any way beyond his just beginning constantly around and showing off, but he didn’t really matter other than the movie blatantly trying to show off their main star more. Hell he wasn’t even that crazy, because he was too logical in the film just weird C) SCREW YOU TIM BURTON. One of the last lines in the movie is “Lets trade with China, nobody has ever thought to do that before” No, screw you, white people have been trading with China since the Roman times, the whole point of our expansion west was “Trade with china” They even mention Hong Kong, then obviously the British have always gotten the Chinese addicted to optimum and are exploiting them for all they are worth. Also feminist message? This is the 1800s, women can’t own ships, she’d be slapped and forced into a marriage, what were you smoking Tim? This is just Tim Burton Masterbating to his own reputation, it’s a waste of everybody’s time and adds nothing. The best word to describe the film is creatively sterile.