Alice in Wonderland
PG, Nationwide
Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland is kind of a joy but it is not a fully-fledged joy, hence the ‘kind of’, in case you were wondering. Mixing live action with CGI, it is sensationally gorgeous to look at — beautiful! Ravishing! Dazzling! — and it does have its wonderfully inventive moments but I was not transported. I wanted to be transported, I longed to be transported. I thought: never mind ‘eat me’, never mind ‘drink me’ just transport me, but it did not happen. I accept it may be my limitation. I never enjoyed Lewis Carroll’s Alice books as a child: a rather dull girl; a succession of weirdos; no proper narrative, and creepy, creepy, creepy. It didn’t do it for me then and perhaps it just doesn’t do it for me now. I liked Black Beauty. Will it do it for you? I’ve really no idea. It may simply come down to preferring this sort of thing over horses with real stories to tell.
A sequel of sorts, the film opens with a young Alice suffering from (what she thinks are) bad dreams about a peculiar world full of weird, talking creatures and then spools forward to Alice (Mia Wasikowska; a total babe) as a 19-year-old about to be married off to a man she does not love. This is Hamish, a posh, ginger-haired prig, and, forced to choose between becoming his wife or disappearing down a rabbit hole, she chooses the rabbit hole, as you very well might if someone was forcing you to marry Simon Heffer, say. Down, down, down, she hurtles, little blue dress all akimbo and, at least initially, it is quite exciting, although I don’t think it has anything to do with the 3D.
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