This is the recent megahit reimagining from director TIM BURTON and starring JOHNNY DEPP. Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter and Crispin Glover.
The story: it starts with a 18-year old Alice going to a party where a young man proposes. She doesn't love him, but he is considered a good catch and Alice is pressured into accepting his proposal. Instead, she sees a strange white rabbit running around and chases him where she falls down a rabbit hole. Now she is in Wonderland (actually Underland, but often mispronounced). She meets strange people who wonder if she is the real Alice. See there was an Alice there years ago, and they are waiting for her to return so they can overthrow the evil Red Queen and restore rule to the White Queen. The Red Queen uses the Jabberwocky to kill any who oppose her, so Alice will have to get the vorpal sword and kill the Jabberwocky on the Frabjous Day. She gets the sword and on the Frabjous Day the White Queen and Red Queen have armies fight on a giant checkerboard. Alice kills the Jabberwocky. The White Queen banishes the Red Queen. Alice drinks the blood of the Jabberwocky and goes home, where she refuses marriage and instead accepts an apprenticeship to a trading company looking to expand into China.
Um, okay. Personally I didn't get into it at all. Visually it's that cool/strange Tim Burton vision, but the actual story didn't engage me at all. While they played a lot with the Alice characters, but I didn't really think they did anything that made them more interesting. I guess they changed them to make them feel more "adult" -- certainly they made them more insane and more violent, but that doesn't really make them better. And the basic story of Alice -- about whether or not she is going to accept the marriage proposal -- just wasn't engaging. That's probably the biggest surprise since I remember Burton saying he thought the original Alice was just a bunch of random encounters, and yet most of this movie felt like a bunch of random encounters just with a lot more violence and a boring pre- post-lude.
More disturbing (than even the drinking of the blood at the end...yuck!), was that this version just seemed to have los all the sense of whimsy and playfulness that the original had. I don't mind reinvention or even a darker version...but this version just never felt fun. And what's the point of Wonderland if not to have some twisted fun?
*** FOR VISUALS SLIGHT RECOMMEND, OTHERWISE PASS ***
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