By Blaine Bridges
Alice in Wonderland is easily the worst drug trip this reviewer has ever endured. It’s even worse than that time I mistook a pit viper for a garden hose. And while the fiery agony of the snake’s venom was eventually sucked away, the painful images of this movie will forever haunt this acid-riddled brain with flashbacks … in three torturous dimensions … forever!
There have always been two problems with adapting Lewis Carrol’s opus to LSD. Firstly, those in charge of creating the scripts were, themselves, addicted to drugs. While there is no basis for that accusation, one only needs to look as far as the original Disney classic to realize that its creators were jonesing for narcotics … Walt Disney, itself!
The second problem is far more complicated than finding a dealer on the down low.
Essentially, the book has virtually no narrative and is instead a trippy collection of moments. Alice, herself, is actually a very passive character — only a vehicle to bring the reader from each psychedelic hallucination to the next. In short, it doesn’t make any sense.
The risk is two-fold. If the film makers decide to give the story context, they could undermine the source material. But if they do it straight, pun intended, the film could lose its audience.
To tackle these difficult problems, Disney hired director Tim Burton, a man who looks like he’s done some serious dope. If there’s one dilemma Burton has always had, it’s his inability to tell a coherent story. So naturally, he should have been perfect for making a serious adaptation of the material.
As the movie played out, one question was begging to be asked: What wasn’t he smoking? The greatest problem of the film is that it has a story, a really weak one. Basically, the yarn exists as an excuse to go on the journey, but it’s so lame, it ultimately betrays both the plot and the weirdness. To give this conundrum some light, allow this reviewer to share an analogy.
Fish Sticks: Sometimes when you cook those deep-fried hot dogs of the sea, the outer crust comes out all bunt; but the inside is still a frozen heap of salmonella-ridden goop. Whale biologists have spent eons studying how these masses of icy dolphin, uh, fish reproductive organs could have such a strange reaction to heat. The mystery has plagued mankind, since the invention of the toaster oven.
How could something be both overcooked and half-baked? For the serious film buffs, Alice in Wonderland illuminates this issue like the aforementioned whale biologists mapping a sturgeon’s genome. Perhaps most insulting is that the tale they tell was ripped off from The Chronicles of Narnia and even culminates in a final “epic” battle.
Alice in Wonderland takes place thirteen years after Alice originally plunged down the rabbit hole. A grown-up Alice only remembers Wonderland as a dream. Though a completely bland and lifeless character, everyone around her acts as if she’s some sort of nineteenth century feminist revolutionary. Taken aback by her dully delivered and passionless ideas (were they supposed to be outrageous?), Alice is seen as an odd girl.
After a proposal from an impossibly ugly man, Alice sees the white rabbit that has haunted her dreams since childhood.
Following him, she soon winds up in the fantasy land, but discovers things are much darker than she last remembered.
The red queen has usurped the entire kingdom, and her tyranny has devastated everything beyond the rabbit hole.
After about an hour of seeing once crazy and lovable characters miserable and sane, you might just want to stand up and start screaming at the screen, “Stop it! Stop making sense! Who’s been painting my roses red? Where’s my medicine?” and throw your popcorn at the screen!
Ambiguity was the greatest strength of the source material; you never knew what was going to happen. At any minute a talking pizza roll could fall from the sky and say “Hey I’m a talking pizza roll.” What audiences are given instead is tantamount to a very un-merry un-birthday indeed.
