Once the shunned oddball stuck playing in his own corner of the Hollywood playground, Tim Burton has in the past few years become the idol of teenagers who fancy themselves artistic and dark. And while it's not hard to see how Burton's trademark macabre and misfit-as-the-hero movies appeal to those leaving childish things behind, Burton has drawn much criticism of late for stylistically repeating himself to the point, some would argue, of self-parody. Personally, while I recognize the validity of these criticisms and would like to see Burton expand as an artist (for which there is still plenty of time; Clint Eastwood is twice his age and is still cranking 'em out every year), to me Tim Burton is like a Hostess cupcake: not the greatest of its kind, not particularly good for you, but reliable in quality. You know what you're getting before you open the package. I think whether Burton works or not for any individual person depends on how much they like the Tim Burton aesthetic to begin with. And being a teenager who fancies himself artistic and dark, I'm usually on board for anything with Burton's name on it.Although his films have always been associated with terms like "twisted" and "dark," Tim Burton's movies--Alice in Wonderland included--are only dark in design. The Burton canon may stylistically be full of looming shadows and twisting staircases, but the typical Burton tone is lighthearted and in fact often campy. There's nothing wrong with this style, but it is a mistake to think that Burton's films are dark in anything but atmosphere. And I think there was an incorrect assumption about Alice before the film came out that Tim Burton was "at last going to give the source material a fittingly spooky adaptation, unlike the watered down Disney version."
The original Disney Alice in Wonderland, however, is actually much darker than Burton's film. Burton's Wonderland is clearly, and at one point literally, divided into "good" and "evil." The White Queen, the Mad Hatter, and the like are Alice's friends and protectors. Despite the movie's insistent (and annoying) winks that all the characters are "mad," Wonderland is less threatening than Narnia. Which is precisely what's wrong with Burton's Alice: it turns what could have been a surreal, dangerous story into a watered down The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. By contrast, the animated Alice in Wonderland is one of Disney's darkest movies. In that film, Wonderland is a wild and strange place, one that is hostile and uninterested in the plight of its child protagonist. At times, Wonderland threatens to swallow Alice up whole. Burton's film contains neither this sense of danger nor one of wonder.
Instead, the Tim Burton Wonderland is tame, dull, and rife with cliches. While the film is at first able to subdue its more trite elements with visual boldness and sharp CGI, the movie's awful last act is enough to push Alice from being a barely good film to being a disappointingly mediocre one. At one point in the film's conclusion, after an (anti-)climactic battle, Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter character begins to dance in celebration, and for one horrifying moment, it appears that the film is going to turn into Shrek. Fortunately, the scene ends before this can happen, but not before it tosses the audience's goodwill to the wind. The movie's final scene, in which Alice conveniently wraps up all the film's hanging dilemmas in one monologue, hammers the final nail into the film's coffin.
While Tim Burton's artistry is usually enough to carry even the director's weaker films, this one cannot be helped. I'd like to lay the blame on the hackneyed screenplay, but Burton is a good enough filmmaker that he should've known and corrected the script's weaker aspects. Unfortunately, Alice in Wonderland is nothing more than Lewis Carroll's classic novel churned through the Hollywood family film formula as presented through Tim Burton's typically morbid visuals. It is Burton's worst film since Planet of the Apes.
