Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland made an absurd amount of money in the box-office, becoming one of the highest grossing films of all-time. So, of course, Linda Woolverton set to work on another script based on the world she had created in the first film. Burton declined to direct the sequel and instead, James Bobin of the recent Muppet movies stepped in. As more of a Lewis Caroll fan than Burton, he wanted to help create and explore this new world.
Like the 2010 film, this is a reimagined Wonderland that carries more logic and structure and darkness. And it is also very loosely based on the books, with some familiar elements sneaking their way into a brand new story. This involves an expansion of the Hatter's backstory as Alice must confront Time himself to help save the Hatter's family. Since this is such a new film I shall warn you that SPOILERS will be found in the Original Source Breakdown.
Original Source Breakdown
(I'll refrain from repeating the pre-existing elements from the 2010 film. Basically, all the main characters from that one reappear in some form or another, even the Jabberwocky.)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Chapter II: The Pool of Tears - MINOR REFERENCE
While there is not any explicit reference to this chapter, the film opens with Alice as a sea captain, which becomes a major element of her adventure as she navigates the Ocean of Time.
Chapter IV: The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill - MINOR REFERENCE
As Alice travels to the past, we get to see Bayard the Bloodhound from the first film as a Puppy.
Chapter VI: Pig and Pepper - MINOR REFERENCE
In the real world, Alice meets with her ex-fiance Hamish from the first film and he is the proud father of a screaming baby boy, not unlike the Baby from this chapter.
Chapter VII: A Mad Tea Party - MAJOR REFERENCES
The whole plot is seemingly based on the Hatter's story about his quarrel with Time in this chapter. Time is now a fully fleshed out character (which is a first for any film adaptation) and as Alice hops through the timeline of Underland, Time follows her and ends up in the exact position that the Hatter references in the story. In the past, we see the Hatter, Hare, and Dormouse about to begin their tea party and when Time comes looking for Alice, the trio hold him back, trick him, and anger him, causing him to keep them in the Eternal Tea Party stasis until their guest Alice shows up (which she'll eventually do in the book).
Chapter XI: Who Stole the Tarts? - MAJOR REFERENCE
We finally learn about the Red Queen's obsession with people stealing her tarts as a stolen tart caused the rift between her and her sister, the White Queen.
Through the Looking-Glass
Chapter I: Looking-Glass House - MAJOR REFERENCES
Alice crosses into Underland this time through the mirror in Hamish's house. The room she enters looks quite like the room from this chapter, with a smiling clock, moving pictures, and a living chess set (who don't seem to be the same characters as the Red and White Queen from this adaptation). Also, we finally see the Slithy Toves in a brief moment later on as the animals leading the Tweedles chariot.
Chapter II: The Garden of Live Flowers - REMOVED
Chapter III: Looking-Glass Insects - MINOR REFERENCE
In the Red Queen's new haunt, she appears to employ many giant bugs, including Gnats.
Chapter IV: Tweedledum and Tweedledee - MINOR REFERENCE
The characters reappear again and when we see them as younger boys, they have a battle in similar fashion to the one from the book.
Chapter V: Wool and Water - MINOR REFERENCES
The same references from the first film reapppear, but now I want to clarify that we see the White Queen as a young girl in the past, so she is definitely not living backwards. At least, she isn't aging backwards.
Chapter VI: Humpty Dumpty - MINOR REFERENCE
When Alice crosses through into the Looking-Glass House, Humpty Dumpty is on the chessboard and immediately falls off when Alice runs into him.
Chapter VII: The Lion and the Unicorn - MINOR REFERENCES
After Humpty falls, the White King from the chessboard orders all of his horses and men to put him back together again. Also, during the past scene of the White and Red Princess's coronation, when the two have their falling out, there are Lion and Unicorn statues on either side of them during their fight. And the outside of the building also sports a flag with the original Tenniel Lion and Unicorn illustrations on it.
Chapter VIII: "It's My Own Invention" - MINOR REFERENCE
When Alice first falls onto the chessboard in the Looking-Glass House, a Red Knight moves to attack her and a White Knight moves to defend her.
Chapter IX: Queen Alice - MINOR REFERENCE?
There are some new minor characters in this film in the form of fruit-and-vegetable people. The best guess I can make is that these creatures represented the Living Food that Alice meets from this chapter, but its a stretch.
Return to Oz (1985) - MAJOR REFERENCES?
In Time's castle, he employs several clockwork creatures that reminded me of TikTok. Also, at one point, Alice ends up in a sadistic mental asylum, much like Dorothy did in this film.
Review:
Right off the bat, this film suffers from a lot of what plagued the 2010 film. An inconsistent tone, a cliched and predictable story, an over-reliance on CGI, and a script that could have used a bit more tweaking. The morals and messages are really hammered in and obvious and they take away from the film as a whole. And we get all of the same unrecognizable and less interesting characters again.
But that being said...
I found myself enjoying this film far more than I did the first one. In fact, if you didn't need to have the first one to establish who all of these characters are, I'd say this was a much better reimagining as a whole and you could do just fine with this film alone. For one thing, I liked that it went The Godfather II route of telling this new story across time, working as both a prequel and a seqeul. It did not just retread the same story either. When Alice begin her time-travelling journey to the past, I was afraid she would just revisit scenes we've seen before or reset characters to the way they were in the first film.
But no, this movie goes beyond all that. We get to see the Hatter before he went mad during his eternal Tea Party. We get to see the Red Queen before she became selfish and big-headed. Some critics may be sick of this whole "origin story" slog of fantasy films, but I felt it was necessary for this franchise. My main issue with the first film was that I never got to meet these new interpretations of characters. We just had to ccept them as they were. These origins allow Depp and Bonham-Cater to draw upon new emotions and tones to give their characters subtlety and it helps tie this reimagining closer to the original stories.
You read that right. For as little as this film had to do with the Alice stories on a literary level, it does a great job of building off of them on a lore level (that isn't just a Lord of the Rings clone). This film is to the original books as Wicked was to The Wizard of Oz. It does out of its way to explain why things were the way they were or to add a new perspective on events. A lot of the original books has to do with accepting these radical characters at face value, but this movie allows us to learn about the Hatter and the Queens in a more fully realized way.
The scene with Time at the tea party was perfect for me. I was afraid that Woolverton/Bobin would just use that minor story as an excuse to make a run-off-the-mill villian without any connection to the original story, but no. In a cool Back-to-the-Future/Primer time travel twist, we see that Alice's interference in the past history of Wonderland/Underland helps set up the events that we see both in the books and the 2010 film. We see why Time and Hatter quarrel in this altered timeline, and it fits in the story and the whole canon.
Time, by the way, is a lot of fun. He's played by Sacha Baron Cohen and Bobin admitted that the character's dialogue was written with him in mind. While I do wish the film handled him a bit more consistently, it was always fun to watch him and see what he would say. He's not an evil villain, as the marketing would have you believe. But he is the antagonist and he is actually a worthier foe for Alice than the Red Queen was in the first film.
And, speaking of the Queens, I like that their subplot was important to the flow of the story, but it wasn't the whole of the story. This time, we actually get to see the Red and White Queen play off of each other and it's more fun pitting them as rivals rather than putting Alice in the middle of them.
I went into this film knowing that it wasn't going to be the best Alice film, but I made sure to keep an open-mind to stay positive. A time-travelling/fantasy/sci-fi plot can be very hit or miss. But I found a lot that I actually liked and appreciated from this new chapter of the Burton-Wonderland. Do we need more stories from this version? No, but it's nice to see an alternative take on the story made by people who actually care about the originals.
3.5 out of 5 Chronospheres
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