Curiouser And Curiouser

We saw Alice In Wonderland over the week­end in 3D. It was a feast for the eyes, we must say.

A lot of work went into the ani­ma­tion of this film. The imag­i­nary world Tim Burton has cre­ated is intri­cate and lush. The added 3D effect draws you even fur­ther into his ver­sion of Lewis Carroll’s dark, trippy world.

The entire cast did a bril­liant job with their char­ac­ters. We loved Helena Bonham Carter as the big headed evil Red Queen, Crispen Glover as the Red Queen’s Knave of Hearts, Matt Lucas as the doltish Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and of course Johnny Depp as the mis­chie­vous Mad Hatter. Alice was played by a young new actor, Mia Wasikowska who was also very good.

The char­ac­ter that really stuck with us was the White Queen played by Anne Hathaway. Hathaway’s per­for­mance was truly orig­i­nal– we loved her take on the queen who was pure of heart, yet still human and flawed. Her cos­tume styling was perfection.

Oh yes, and the cos­tumes. The cos­tumes were gor­geous. Colorful and exquis­itely tai­lored, they were bril­liantly con­cepted by cos­tume designer Colleen Atwood (Sleepy Hollow, Sweeney Todd, Memoirs of a Geisha). One of our favorite parts of the movie was watch­ing Alice’s cos­tume changes and trans­for­ma­tions. Just beautiful.

The visu­als and the act­ing were fan­tas­tic, but we have to admit, the story was a bit dis­ap­point­ing. Burton took a dif­fer­ent angle on the clas­sic story– Alice is grown up, a teenager now, and goes back to Wonderland with a more mature per­spec­tive. She finds her­self thrown into a con­flict of good ver­sus evil, and is pres­sured into tak­ing on an epic quest.

It just kind of fell flat. Tim Burton and Alice In Wonderland sounded like a delight­fully dis­turb­ing com­bi­na­tion and got us excited about this film for some time. We were hop­ing to wit­ness some unex­pected, witty lines from Depp or Bonham Carter, but were left feel­ing a bit empty. We wanted it to be a lit­tle darker, or a lit­tle more twisted.

In all, we say this is a good movie and you should def­i­nitely go to the the­ater to see it on the big screen in 3D. It was good, just not amaz­ing like we hoped.

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