Carroll’s original novel, a follow-up to the wildly successful Wonderland published six years previous, is mostly based on a complex and wide-ranging game of chess.
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“Anything of this scale is going to be daunting, but it’s matched by your excitement at the prospect of what it could be”, says Bobin, who directed The Muppets, Muppets Most Wanted, and the TV series Flight of the Conchords and Da Ali G Show. Director James Bobin, who was so fun in the two recent Muppet movies, is completely overwhelmed by the proceedings here, giving the movie no rhythm or forward propulsion; the movie just sort of flops around, waiting to get started until it finally begins to wait to end.
The film has been panned in reviews so far, with critics lamenting the sequel’s lack of connection to Lewis Carroll’s source material (Alice becomes a ship captain in the film version) with a “candy-shop production design” that can’t quite save the story, but instead often runs right over it.
Wasikowska, fresh off a plane from Australia and fighting a cold, is inching her fitted black Valentino dress down, jokingly wishing it were a blanket.
Alice also meets Time (Sasha Baron Cohen), an encounter that opens the door for several time-related puns and jokes. Turns out Mad Hatter has gone into depression after he made a revelation about his family, who has been presumed to be dead until then. The Hatter has lost his Muchness, so Mirana (Hathaway) sends Alice on a quest to borrow the Chronosphere, a metallic globe inside the chamber of the Grand Clock which powers all time. Thankfully, that’s possible because Time is a person, played by Sacha Baron Cohen. The muddled script by Woolverton has Alice stealing a time traveling device to focus on the Red Queen’s (Helena Bonham Carter) origin more than Hatter’s woes. Alice’s is necessary to read, particularly if you haven’t seeing the film, in order to understand the context of the side-character’s stories. We especially love the heart-shaped lips on the Red Queen, though the White Queen’s hair is kind of awesome as well. The Wonderland part is the fantastical dream part, but real-life Alice’s reality (which is a more feminist Pirates of the Caribbean than Keira Knightley ever got) is nothing like what it would have been in reality.
It’s no wonder the resulting picture feels forced and mechanical.
Carroll’s work was riveting precisely because it was wholly unexplained and inexplicable.
White Queen: “Can you do division? Take a bone from a dog: what remains?”
“Yeah, I think it helped a bit”, says Bobin. “Try to avoid people who write incredibly, sometimes entertaining, but fictitious things about you!” I think there is a reason why Alice was called to sail the high seas – to fulfill her own father’s destiny.
There were some things I really enjoyed in this film and some things that were less successful.
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With its emphasis on trippy visuals and unusual creatures (a grinning cat that can turn invisible, a blue caterpillar that smokes a hookah, a “Jabberwocky”), Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland lends itself to the world of cinema. She’s grown up, and it seems a tad silly for her to jump into the mirror as a grown up.
