Visually, Disney's recent re-do of Alice in Wonderland, is wonderful.
The live action characters are puppets in a world that is of a large part animated.. which looks really fantastic. Sometimes the backgrounds look a bit distant compared to the up close, especially in 3D, but it still looks wonderful. The costumes and characters look stunning too.
Unfortunately, everything else isn't as good as it first appears.
The trailers are short, giving us an introduction to the wonderful world of Wonderland, mainly featuring Johnny Depp running around with a big hat on looking pretty epic. It suggests a slight twist on the book's story and a pretty good laugh, especially for kids.
However, it's not actually too great.
Firstly - the story is a mess. The film starts with Alice, as a young girl, waking in the night from dreams of a strange world with blue caterpillars and smiling cats... And then skips to her later, where she is proposed to by an arrogant and pompous - well acted - guy...and surprise, surprise - she doesn't want to marry him. Instead, she decides to run after a little rabbit with a clock.
The rabbit with the clock is leading her on, and he's not late for anything. It turns out Alice is returning to Underland, and it's not her first time - this time she must return the throne to the White Queen as the Red Queen has taken over, and slay the Jabberwocky.
The simple and humorous story of the books has been...well, Disneyfied. Badly.
Some of the characters have their own sub-stories - and although some of these are good - the Red Queen with her exceptionally large head is made to believe that all of her henchmen and women also have extremely large body parts, but they are all fake - most of them aren't too great, a main and not very well presented one being the Mad Hatter's, as he tries to grapple with the fact that he may actually be - "Mad."
There's a little sly bit that is only mentioned once in the film, where Alice is taking a walk with someone (forgot who) through the garden, and she says she ordered red flowers but they have white, and Alice says "Why not paint them?" "What a strange thing to say," she replies. I was probably one of the only people in the cinema to smile. It's a case of, read the book and don't watch the film.
Those who have read the book will be disappointed; those who haven't will find themselves looking at an unclear, cloudly story in which the protagonist sees everything just as cloudily as we do. She only realises she isn't dreaming near the end, and for some reason she doesn't recognise that the creatures and characters she is seeing in front of her and being introduced to are actually those that have been in her dreams for the past 15 years or so. To make this worse, quite a lot of the conversation is unrealistic and doesn't flow.
This not-flowing also applies to the characters and the fun suggested in the trailer. It's not as lively and exciting as it looks as to be and some parts are even boring.
The casting of the Mad Hatter, Johnny Depp, didn't seem to suit that well afterwards either.
It has some - I think you could call it - charm to it though. The Red Queen gets little animals to do, like, everything for her. There's a good scene where one of the frogs that work for her has eaten one of her tarts and she is trying to work out which one.
There are some funny characters too - a really mad rabbit at the tea party with the Mad Hatter, and Tweedledum and Tweedledee - Matt Lucas - are one of the best things about the film.
Although it's not quite what I was expecting, it's still good. It has a lot of good moments and it looks very pretty, but it doesn't stand up to a lot of other kid's films these days. I suppose most young people will find the plot fairly average, and everything else probably won't be noticed. It will just look amazing, and that's the best part.
It's good and it's worth a watch for some kids, probably some teens, and adults will love the charm that's often shown in Disney films...but, there's always Harry Potter. And there's plenty more that could definitely stand up to it.
Let's hope the film of the future doesn't just turn to the special graffics and the obvious charms - and stays focused on everything else too.
6/10
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