Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

[Verdad]

Anyone seen it? We went to see it today and I'm, let's say, underwhelmed. What say you?

 

[Tio_Narratore]

Shallow, superficial, simplified. Much potential lost to a trite story. Nice costumes; underwhelming 3-D. Only the concluding flight of the metamorphosed caterpillar soared. And, if accepted, the definitive end of Alice stories. I won't accept it; there is more to be said.

 

[CharleyH]

As a fan of Lewis Carroll it's hard to comment. I will simply say that I ADORED Helena Bonham Carter, she was fan-fucking-tabulous!

 

[Verdad]

Shallow, superficial, simplified. Much potential lost to a trite story. Nice costumes; underwhelming 3-D. Only the concluding flight of the metamorphosed caterpillar soared.

Glad to have that part confirmed because I didn't actually see the movie in 3D. I'd already heard it's not comparable to Avatar in that regard, so I decided to save myself the headache and go for 2D. Now that I've seen it, I'm pretty sure 3D wouldn't have changed my opinion one way or the other!

As a fan of Lewis Carroll it's hard to comment. I will simply say that I ADORED Helena Bonham Carter, she was fan-fucking-tabulous!

I'm not even that big a fan of Lewis Carroll and I still find it hard to comment.

The Red Queen was awesome, though she immediately reminded me of, what's her name, Miranda Richardson in Black Adder? I suppose it was an homage, but quite brilliant. The whole Narnia business, though—hmph.

 

[Verdad]

Just so as not to appear cryptic to those who haven't seen it, here's the movie in brief:

In this incarnation of the story, Alice is a young woman of 19, faced with a prospect of marriage to a super dull lord. Following his proposal, she runs off and falls into the rabbit hole that leads to Wonderland (called Underland in the movie). The world and the adventures she encounters there are a familiar mixture of elements from both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking glass, except this time, the story is entirely straightforward.

Instead of the dream-logic and puzzles that awaited the original Alice, in this incarnation she's a typical Campbellian hero who has to discover her destiny, slay the beast, and, uh, self-actualize. Properly empowered after her victory over the forces of evil, represented by the Red Queen and her dragon Jabberwocky, she returns to tell the dull lord where to shove it and sails off to a destiny she alone controls.

Seeing that we often complain about the lack of strong female characters, this should sound like a positive. Alas, it's not. The movie is a stale piece of Victorian revisionism, its empowering 'message' asserting itself at the cost of suffocating the originals' charm. I'd have been happy to see any amount of liberties taken with Carroll's originals had they resulted in something new, but it's rather as though Carroll's weirdness and Burton's weirdness canceled each other out to create something entirely vanilla.

The result is neither a faithful rendition of the originals nor a courageous spin off that would elucidate the story or bring it to bear on something contemporary. It's pretty enough, but also cloyingly safe. The only thing that got a smirk out of me was that the good side of the Underland's conflict appeared no less menacing than the bad side, but I might have been desperate enough to project too much meaning into that.

Still, if there's a kid you have to take to see it, there are a few perks to make it bearable. As Charley said, Helena Bonham Carter is great as Red Queen, and as for Johnny Depp (Mad Hatter, whose role has been significantly (over)expanded), you have to either love or hate him. I'm not sure which I choose myself—he's being so Depp that you can't resist being charmed, but he's also being so Depp that you have to roll your eyes.

 

[Stella_Omega]

Verdad, you describe exactly the movie I was assuming we'd see.
*shrugs*

I am pathetically grateful for a self-empowered female hero, of course. Here's hoping for more of them. It would be amazing, to be able to pick and choose a bit.

 

[3113]

Anyone seen it? We went to see it today and I'm, let's say, underwhelmed. What say you?

Shallow, superficial, simplified. Much potential lost to a trite story. Nice costumes; underwhelming 3-D.

Thank gawd! I feared I'd be reading some praise of this film. It was lazy, sloppy, utter hogwash! The most proof of this is when Alice first goes down the rabbit hole and the movie follows the book faithfully for a bout ten glorious minutes--it was interesting, exciting, cool.

Then it veers left into some 12th rate bad-high-fantasy trope that's boring, embarrassing, badly written and an over-all stupid mess. It was less than "underwelming" it was god-damn shame.

I am pathetically grateful for a self-empowered female hero.

You would have to be living under the Taliban to see this Alice as a symbol of female self-empowerment.

Remember the old "destiny is a cop out?" Well, Alice is not the hero thanks to self-empowerment, choice and determination. She is "destined" to be the heroine and everything she does was meant to be. She is fated to do all this. And, luckily, there's a selfless MadHatter, a pretty white queen, etc, etc. around to drive her into doing what she meant to do. Hey, there is even the specter of her father to guide her--because mothers only want to force you to wear corsets and get married.

Only bold, creative, self-sacrificing men can guide a girl into becoming the heroine she refuses to be--but must be for the sake of all! *SIGH*

 

[Stella_Omega]

You would have to be living under the Taliban to see this Alice as a symbol of female self-empowerment.

Remember the old "destiny is a cop out?" Well, Alice is not the hero thanks to self-empowerment, choice and determination. She is "destined" to be the heroine and everything she does was meant to be. She is fated to do all this. And, luckily, there's a selfless MadHatter, a pretty white queen, etc, etc. around to drive her into doing what she meant to do. Hey, there is even the specter of her father to guide her--because mothers only want to force you to wear corsets and get married.

Only bold, creative, self-sacrificing men can guide a girl into becoming the heroine she refuses to be--but must be for the sake of all! *SIGH*

Welll... shee hut. And fuck.

 

[Verdad]

Verdad, you describe exactly the movie I was assuming we'd see.
*shrugs*

I am pathetically grateful for a self-empowered female hero, of course. Here's hoping for more of them. It would be amazing, to be able to pick and choose a bit.

You're way wiser than me! I still set my expectations too high, time and again. And, I do feel like you; I kind of didn't want to spit entirely on a female hero—something is better than nothing, but it's a slim something indeed. I mean, for how much longer are girls supposed to celebrate that they can say "no" to wearing corsets or to arranged marriages? If anything, the message of that is entirely conservative: "See how lucky you are in comparison to a 100 years ago? Now count your blessings and don't rock the boat."

More important, though, I didn't go to see Alice in Wonderland to see it hijacked by this message or some other. I went to see it to be enchanted and entertained and to gain some new perspective on the story, and there was little of the former and none of the latter. I suppose butchering of classics is nothing if not a time-honored Disney tradition.

 

[Verdad]

Thank gawd! I feared I'd be reading some praise of this film.

Not at all! I even wondered if there's a point in starting the thread just to say "ugh"—it feels kind of petty—but I figured it's still better than politics.

Remember the old "destiny is a cop out?" Well, Alice is not the hero thanks to self-empowerment, choice and determination. She is "destined" to be the heroine and everything she does was meant to be. She is fated to do all this. And, luckily, there's a selfless MadHatter, a pretty white queen, etc, etc. around to drive her into doing what she meant to do. Hey, there is even the specter of her father to guide her--because mothers only want to force you to wear corsets and get married.

I said it recently and I'll say again, I'm thoroughly tired of monomyth-like stories, even in their better renditions and regardless of whether it's a male or a female hero, but I'm kind of at a loss as to alternative story structures. Any thoughts on that? What are they?

 

[JackLuis]

I said it recently and I'll say again, I'm thoroughly tired of monomyth-like stories, even in their better renditions and regardless of whether it's a male or a female hero, but I'm kind of at a loss as to alternative story structures. Any thoughts on that? What are they?

I believe Lewis Carroll might be a place to start.

 

[Verdad]

I believe Lewis Carroll might be a place to start.

Touché!

Any other thoughts, though? Can we escape this tiresome story structure and how?

 

[jomar]

I heard from a credible source that it kind of sucked and that's good enough for me.

 

[Stella_Omega]

I suppose butchering of classics is nothing if not a time-honored Disney tradition.

Indeedy!

 

[3113]

I said it recently and I'll say again, I'm thoroughly tired of monomyth-like stories, even in their better renditions and regardless of whether it's a male or a female hero, but I'm kind of at a loss as to alternative story structures. Any thoughts on that? What are they?

I'm in agreement that following Carroll would have been a wise idea. One irony of the whole movie is that Alice is portrayed as a rebel, the one not wearing a corset, the creative misfit who thinks outside the rigid box. The reason this is ironic is because Alice in Wonderland is all about the fact that Alice keeps acting (or trying to act) like the rational adult in Wonderland (she is constantly arguing about what makes sense or what is proper), while Wonderland's inhabitants are the ones who are the wacky misfits with a fresh and different perspective. Carroll's message is that children (especially little girls) shouldn't want to grow up so fast.

This is one of the reasons that I thought the writing for this movie was sloppy. Alice, from the beginning, is a "generic" rebel given token, and easy ways to be rebellious--like not wearing a corset or not wanting to marry the awful aristocrat. This is paper rebellion. It's easy for the audience to identify and cheer on her rebellion--we wouldn't want to marry that horrible guy either. She is a rebel who wants to rebel and we want her to rebel as well. All she really learns after being in Wonderland is to express her rebellious nature even more openly than not wearing a corset.

Bit whoop. Does this girl really need a trip down the rabbit hole and to slay a jabberwocky in order to say, "I'm not marrying this awful guy"?

Real rebellion which makes for a better plot, character arc--and forces the viewer to really have to think about the issue, requires difficult decisions. And true courage. The hero must be willing to pay a heavy price--not end up walking away from a bad, arranged marriage they didn't want in the first place and being rewarded with a free trip to China. What if, for example, Alice was being offered every little girl's dream. This marriage was to a handsome prince, and she was going to have wonderful friends and be the coolest girl in school? If, thanks to her adventure, she decides to reject all this and go in a different direction, one that is going to be honestly hard, then we have true rebellion. Not faux, token, sloppy-movie rebellion. The sort of rebellion that Lewis Carroll understood and advocated.

 

[JackLuis]

They could have updated Alice to make the "crazies" reflect modern day weirdness. And had Alice react as a "modern" adult to the weirdness.

Each of the characters in Alice embodied the features of the Victorian world so why not change the Queen to Ms Hillary and the mad hatter to Richard Pearl?

Disney being Disney doesn't want to offend anybody so it is unlikely we will see real satire in their movies.

Who would you have changed to whom in order to update the characters?

 

[Stella_Omega]

I'm in agreement that following Carroll would have been a wise idea. One irony of the whole movie is that Alice is portrayed as a rebel, the one not wearing a corset, the creative misfit who thinks outside the rigid box. The reason this is ironic is because Alice in Wonderland is all about the fact that Alice keeps acting (or trying to act) like the rational adult in Wonderland (she is constantly arguing about what makes sense or what is proper), while Wonderland's inhabitants are the ones who are the wacky misfits with a fresh and different perspective. Carroll's message is that children (especially little girls) shouldn't want to grow up so fast.

This is one of the reasons that I thought the writing for this movie was sloppy. Alice, from the beginning, is a "generic" rebel given token, and easy ways to be rebellious--like not wearing a corset or not wanting to marry the awful aristocrat. This is paper rebellion. It's easy for the audience to identify and cheer on her rebellion--we wouldn't want to marry that horrible guy either. She is a rebel who wants to rebel and we want her to rebel as well. All she really learns after being in Wonderland is to express her rebellious nature even more openly than not wearing a corset.

Bit whoop. Does this girl really need a trip down the rabbit hole and to slay a jabberwocky in order to say, "I'm not marrying this awful guy"?

Real rebellion which makes for a better plot, character arc--and forces the viewer to really have to think about the issue, requires difficult decisions. And true courage. The hero must be willing to pay a heavy price--not end up walking away from a bad, arranged marriage they didn't want in the first place and being rewarded with a free trip to China. What if, for example, Alice was being offered every little girl's dream. This marriage was to a handsome prince, and she was going to have wonderful friends and be the coolest girl in school? If, thanks to her adventure, she decides to reject all this and go in a different direction, one that is going to be honestly hard, then we have true rebellion. Not faux, token, sloppy-movie rebellion. The sort of rebellion that Lewis Carroll understood and advocated.

This. Oh, this.

 

[Verdad]

Indeedy!

I had to check to see that you're not kidding. I guess I am an incurable optimist!

They could have updated Alice to make the "crazies" reflect modern day weirdness. And had Alice react as a "modern" adult to the weirdness.

Each of the characters in Alice embodied the features of the Victorian world so why not change the Queen to Ms Hillary and the mad hatter to Richard Pearl?

Disney being Disney doesn't want to offend anybody so it is unlikely we will see real satire in their movies.

Who would you have changed to whom in order to update the characters?

Laughing. I think I would have been horrified by a too modernizing approach too. Or any other that makes too much sense. That bit I liked, though—White Queen being as unappetizing as Red Queen—did have a relevant political undertone, or so I thought.

The Red Queen's world is a classic totalitarianism, with a dictator that yells "Off with their heads!" over smallest infractions. The White Queen's world should be its polar opposite, the side for which we should root, yet her ever so delicate disposition, her refusal to harm even a fly while expecting someone else to kill for her, and her incongruently death-like make-up make her in a way scarier than her sister, or at the very least, remind us they're ultimately of the same breed. For me, that sort of evokes the hollowness of contemporary voters' choices, as well as questions whether the post-communist world indeed presents an end of tyrannies or whether they're just taking a different guise.

I readily admit I might be grasping for straws of meaning there, though.

 

[Verdad]

I'm in agreement that following Carroll would have been a wise idea. One irony of the whole movie is that Alice is portrayed as a rebel, the one not wearing a corset, the creative misfit who thinks outside the rigid box. The reason this is ironic is because Alice in Wonderland is all about the fact that Alice keeps acting (or trying to act) like the rational adult in Wonderland (she is constantly arguing about what makes sense or what is proper), while Wonderland's inhabitants are the ones who are the wacky misfits with a fresh and different perspective. Carroll's message is that children (especially little girls) shouldn't want to grow up so fast.

This is one of the reasons that I thought the writing for this movie was sloppy. Alice, from the beginning, is a "generic" rebel given token, and easy ways to be rebellious--like not wearing a corset or not wanting to marry the awful aristocrat. This is paper rebellion. It's easy for the audience to identify and cheer on her rebellion--we wouldn't want to marry that horrible guy either. She is a rebel who wants to rebel and we want her to rebel as well. All she really learns after being in Wonderland is to express her rebellious nature even more openly than not wearing a corset.

Bit whoop. Does this girl really need a trip down the rabbit hole and to slay a jabberwocky in order to say, "I'm not marrying this awful guy"?

Real rebellion which makes for a better plot, character arc--and forces the viewer to really have to think about the issue, requires difficult decisions. And true courage. The hero must be willing to pay a heavy price--not end up walking away from a bad, arranged marriage they didn't want in the first place and being rewarded with a free trip to China. What if, for example, Alice was being offered every little girl's dream. This marriage was to a handsome prince, and she was going to have wonderful friends and be the coolest girl in school? If, thanks to her adventure, she decides to reject all this and go in a different direction, one that is going to be honestly hard, then we have true rebellion. Not faux, token, sloppy-movie rebellion. The sort of rebellion that Lewis Carroll understood and advocated.

Very well said, and I'd like to add, that generic feeling comes from there being little resonance between this Alice and the Underland which is, after all, supposed to be her psyche. Since she was made older and since she's escaping marriage/sexuality, one would expect that conflict to be somehow represented in her quest, but there's none of it. She's simply plunged in a random adventure that could belong to anyone. If one tries really hard, I suppose one could say the Red and White queens are two female archetypes she's supposed to overcome, but that's a rather laborious reading and doesn't really make the story any better.

When I asked about the alternative to this story structure, though, I meant something more general, something I've noticed I've gotten tired of even in well-executed stories. Anything entirely linear, anything in which the character has to overcome obstacles a, b, c in order to reach goal d, even when it's well-motivated and lavishly original in execution (none of which was true of this movie), just makes me terribly impatient. Either I'm becoming a curmudgeon or I might be ready for postmodernism after all…

 

[laurafairlie]

I saw the film and wasn't impressed at all with it. The poetic license they took with the story and characters went beyond my comfort level altogether. I loved the original tale and still remember most vividly the illustrations in the book I had as a child. I really had high hopes for the film, but as you so nicely said in your original post, it was underwhelming.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Another female Special Olympics action hero! Why am I not surprised?

 

[Bobby_3111]

I thought it was ok, but nowhere near what I expected.

 

[stephen55]

Was he or wasn't he.........

I think it would have been very difficult for a director, even one as good as Burton, to bring off a movie that faithfully followed Lewis Carroll's book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It was written both as a children's book and as a work in Mathematics. Charles Dodgson, who wrote the story under the pseudonym of Carroll was a mathematician and a logician, as well as an Anglican deacon. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the sequel, Through the Looking-Glass were filled with Dodgson's ideas on matrix algebra, mathematical logic and geometry. Hidden in both works were clever jabs at Victorian societal mores.

I read Alice in junior high school because my dad said it was full of math. At thirteen, I didn't get it at all. Then years later I got a copy of Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice. Gardener, also a Mathematician, sorted it all out and what was a silly kid's book became a treasure of double entendres and wit, mixed with an undercurrent of sadness. The White Knight becomes a crushing messenger of heartbreak and the Jabberwocky in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There becomes much more than a source of nonsense.

As for Alice, Dodgson denied it but seems reasonable that she was Alice Liddell, the youngest daughter of Henry Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/05/Alice_Liddell_2.jpg/170px-Alice_Liddell_2.jpg
This photograph of Alice Liddell was taken by Dodgson himself.

Dodgson befriended Alice and it was she who asked Dodgson to write down the stories he told to her. Because of his interest in children and his hobby of photographing them, in various stages of dress, Dodgson has been accused of being a paedophile. Morton Cohen, who wrote a biography of Dodgson had this to say...

We cannot know to what extent sexual urges lay behind Charles's preference for drawing and photographing children in the nude. He contended the preference was entirely aesthetic. But given his emotional attachment to children as well as his aesthetic appreciation of their forms, his assertion that his interest was strictly artistic is naïve. He probably felt more than he dared acknowledge, even to himself.

Other biographers disagree and point to a common Victorian genre of the "Victorian Child Cult", which perceived child-nudity as essentially an expression of innocence. Nude children appeared on Victorian Christmas cards. Martin Gardener was one of those who are certain that Dodgson was a paedophile. Hughes Lebailly, another writer who feels Dodgson was unfairly demonized...

concludes that it has been an error of Dodgson's biographers to view his child-photography with 20th or 21st century eyes, and to have presented it as some form of personal idiosyncrasy, when it was in fact a response to a prevalent aesthetic and philosophical movement of the time.

Perhaps his true nature will never be known. If I was on the jury, I'd go with acquittal.

 

[3113]

I think it would have been very difficult for a director, even one as good as Burton, to bring off a movie that faithfully followed Lewis Carroll's book,

But that's the thing! When she falls down the Rabbit Hole the movie DOES follow the book faithfully for about 10 minutes. And it's GREAT! Riveting. Cool, neat, interesting, and exciting.

It's only when the movie takes that left turn into it's own, dull, badly-written monomythic story that you start to yawn and shake your head. He could have done it. He presents concrete evidence of that.

The most ironic thing here is that scared as we assume producers were that the movie would tank if it didn't have that dull generic story, the very fact that it was in 3-D, which people are going to see rather like going on a theme park ride, means that it would have probably been as much a success if it had kept to the book. Maybe more as the ride would have been a lot more interesting. And the ride is what matters in 3-D. Not the story.

 

[Tio_Narratore]

But that's the thing! When she falls down the Rabbit Hole the movie DOES follow the book faithfully for about 10 minutes. And it's GREAT! Riveting. Cool, neat, interesting, and exciting.

It's only when the movie takes that left turn into it's own, dull, badly-written monomythic story that you start to yawn and shake your head. He could have done it. He presents concrete evidence of that.

The most ironic thing here is that scared as we assume producers were that the movie would tank if it didn't have that dull generic story, the very fact that it was in 3-D, which people are going to see rather like going on a theme park ride, means that it would have probably been as much a success if it had kept to the book. Maybe more as the ride would have been a lot more interesting. And the ride is what matters in 3-D. Not the story.

Not even the first ten minutes. Only the fall into the hole is from "Alice's Adventures Underground." In the original she discovers how to control her speed of descent and examines some of the objects around her, even reading labels.
Aside from Bonham Carter's Sympathetic Red Queen, the only thing clever I found was in the caterpillar's response to Alice near the end. She claims he said she wasn't Alice, and he corrects her, pointing out that he actually said that she was "hardly Alice," adding that she was now much closer to being Alice. That seems to have been the gist of the story, but it could have been developed so much better; after all, even in the carriage ride to her expected engagement, she is at least still rebellious.
I think the idea of having a 19-year old Alice in need of regaining her "muchness" had potential; if only it had found an author up to the task.