Or, as the script would have it titled, Um in Underland. Now, I’m a Tim Burton apologist, so I’m inclined to forgive this movie for many faults, but… he’s always in debt to his screenplays. Sadly, sometimes the screenplays can’t pay the bills, either. This one falls completely flat in the third act. The idea is actually quite nifty, a sort of wrap-up of an imagined trilogy started by Carroll’s Alice and Through the Looking Glass. I would have liked to see Wonderland as an allegory for the choices 19-year-old Alice has to make in a hide-bound British society, and that’s indeed what we get, right up to the point when the screenwriter chickens out and decides a fight with a Jabberwocky is more important than a coherent story. Burton’s visual flourishes drive the story, and I’ll never understand those who denigrate him as repetitive. Aside from a dash of spindly trees and striped clothing, this is his most original barrage of set decorating since Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and he has always reserved his macabre Goreyisms for his macabre movies. The 3-D is gimmicky and unnatural — even with this new technology, I feel like I’m swimming through a movie instead of kicking back to watch it — and I’m not entirely sure I understand what Johnny Depp was doing with the role of the Mad Hatter, mad as it was. Entertaining enough, and completely forgivable in its mistakes if you see it as a movie primarily for children, but not one of Burton’s best, and certainly not as good as it could have been.
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