Alice in Chains

Apparently Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland is now breaking all box office records, pulling ahead of even Avatar.

I went to see it with my eight-year-old, and I did not like it any more than Avatar.

Artistically, it is a travesty of the original, like painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. Sure, it's fair game to adapt what came before—Lewis Carroll did it himself. But the film has many unnecessary errors in detail which just a little care could have corrected, had Tim Burton and his crew cared either for the original work or the intelligence of their audiences. That they were not almost suggests a contempt for both. For example, all characters persistently refer to the dragon-like creature of the famous poem as “the Jabberwocky.” That, sans article, is the name of the poem; the creature, as the poem makes clear, is “the Jabberwock.” What harm in getting it right? Worse, the film even has the Mad Hatter recite the poem---incorrectly. He flubs the reference to the JubJub Bird. This makes no sense at all: the JubJub Bird even appears later in the film, and could have been introduced by this instead of appearing from nowhere. It is pure carelessness, and insulting in assuming no one will either know or care.

But then again, if anyone in the audience had actually read the poem, and the book, the film would automatically be in trouble. They would then know that the film's basic premise is wrong. It is that Alice has been brought back to Wonderland because she is predestined to slay the Jabberwock. Unfortunately, in the poem itself, even though nothing else is clear in it, it is clear that the person who slays the Jabberwock is male. “Beware the Jabberwock, my son.” “Come to my arms, my beamish boy!”

Stupid, ignorant; but then again, what could be more stupid and ignorant than the notion that everything in Wonderland is predestined, planned, controlled? That it all makes sense? This is the worst travesty of all, since it is so completely against the spirit of the original. Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland has a plot. A proper Hollywood plot, a battle between good and evil, a heated chase, at least a hint of a love interest, leading up to a climactic fight scene in which the supposed underdog inevitably triumphs at the last minute.

Excuse me; now I think I need to spew.

It is all completely predictable from the outset, and a workmanlike effort is made to fit all the pieces together for character motivations and so forth. This violates the essence of nonsense literature. What made the original Wonderland wonderful was that little matter of wonder: that nothing seemed to make any sense, there was no apparent reason for anything, one could not figure out anybody's motive, and none of the pieces ever quite fit.

All gone.

One moment of horror in the film is when the absurdly long nose of one of the Red Queen's courtiers simply falls off, without explanation, in the middle of a scene. The point, I suppose, is to suggestt that nothing in Wonderland is what it appears; but the immediate effect is to shatter finally and completely the willing suspension of disbelief on which a place like Wonderland utterly depends. Suddenly, one is watching a film, and suddenly all the makeup looks rather cheap and poorly done. And suddenly, one is intensely aware that someone is trying hard to manipulate you.

Where the original Alice was a seemingly inexaustible well of creativity and novelty, this sequel Alice, but for the high-tech visuals, is as conventional as canned tomato soup. There are no new bits of verbal or philosophical cleverness; instead, the film flogs to death a little joke that was a throwaway line in the original Alice, the Mad Hatter's unanswerable riddle “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” He repeats it at least four times in the film, then at last triumphantly announces that it has no answer. The point seems to be to remove all need of thinking from the audience, whereas the original Alice is wonderful for the complex thoughts it provokes.

A decent effort would have managed to come up with four new riddles, at least.

The film also, perversely, insists on forcing out a moral from the White Queen's perfect manifesto of nonsense, “Why sometimes I manage to believe six impossible things before breakfast.” This is actually presented as a profundity, a rule to live by.

It is like listening to a beautiful classic song sung by someone tone deaf. These people have no idea what the nonsense genre is about.

In place of wit or creativity, we are given cheap thrills: people swallowing disgusting Fear Factor brews, the Bandersnatch's eye popping out, the Jabberwock's head bouncing down stairs, even the inevitable 3D spear thrust directly at the audience. Then there is the tasteless, and tastelessly repeated, bit about Alice shedding her clothes each time she changes size, for example. Snort, har, har, nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Almost makes you ashamed to be an adult, that the filmmakers think this is going to keep you amused. In the original book, of course, Alice's clothes simply changed size with her. And why not, in Wonderland?

This is slightly more tasteful than it might have been given that Alice in this version is no longer a little girl, but nineteen years old. On the other hand, the age change introduces its own problems. The original Wonderland was, after all, entirely the creation of a seven-year-old's fantasy, and was a stunning insight into the world as experienced by a child. Having Wonderland endure to age nineteen, however, turns a touching childhood reverie into what looks rather more like a case of late adolescent onset paranoid schizophrenia. There's a bit of a problem of taste there too, methinks.

Yeah, go and see it. Just bring toast to throw at the screen.