Review of Alice in Wonderland (2010) by Chads. — 06 Mar 2010

It's anarchy on Victorian literature; anarchy in the 19th century U.K. This latest version of "Alice in Wonderland" wants to make a feminist hero out of the Lewis Carroll heroine. According to the oraculum, she's Alice the Jabberwocky Slayer.

This time around, Prophecy Girl is not here just to have tea. This special effects-driven film shares with Steven Spielberg's "Hook" the not altogether unappealing gimmick of an adult who returns to the fantastical realm that he/she haunted as a child.

Alice was at the scene of the crime; the day that the Red Queen(Helena Bonham Carter) bombed the White Queen's court, in which the Hatter(Johnny Depp) went mad as he walked among the burning ruins.

(The PG rating precludes the presence of royal court casualties.) As a young child, Alice suffered from nightmares and would ask her father about the state of her mental health. Too bad the calibration is all off on Alice's character; too bad she wasn't truly mad, somebody who would wake up screaming all throughout her life.

This childhood trauma(that the film never addresses) has no effect on her as an adult. She seems fine in the carriage with her mother, en route to a garden party. It's him, not her, when Alice runs away from a formal marriage proposal at the gazebo, conducted in front of their friends and family.

It should be the other way around. For commercial purposes, Alice is given no character arc. She enters, then emerges from Wonderland without any discernible changes. Her "Lord of the Rings" adventure could have been more rousing if she arrived in the shire, I mean Wonderland, as the Mad Debutante who ditched an Edward Ferrars-like bridegroom, and not the prig that Alice detests.

Even Jane Austen's women got married. Set in the Victorian period, "Alice in Wonderland" should end with a wedding, not with the actions of a suffragette. This film has no sense and sensibility for its time and place.