okay i'm only saying at least 50 % because personally, i enjoy this movie after seeing past the downs it has, but regardless, it does have downs and i am going to generally attack this movie with them.
plot: it is generally similar to the movie Hook. Hook was about peter pan returning to neverland grown up and eventually remembering his time in neverland before and then had his final battle with captain hook. now that movie was a cheesy one but it turned out to be a great movie still. I mean some of my siblings and i plan to have that movie be shown and treasured to our children who will do the same with their children and their children and their children and so on. and in a way this movie feels the same, but they don't really make it as a great movie to be remembered. this is generally so because by making it something like Hook...and a bit like the recent Narnia movies as well i'll add, they are just making wonderland a place with not a much wonder at all. which is something that at least Hook had a little bit of.
Characters/Acting: there's a lot to say about the characters that makes this subject mixed but generally negative about them.
1) one thing i find i ridiculous is how they are adding names to minor characters unnecessarily. and this is actually something that Disney has been doing for quite a while. to me it seems like after seeing The Lord of the Rings, they thought it was hip, if you will, too add names to characters that play not all that big roles in the movies. now it made sense for Lord of the Rings because such names were actually from the book for those particular characters. and for most of them, you never even hear their names at all in the movies. So Disney has done the same so far with most of their big, live-action, movies such as Narnia and Pirates. With Narnia there were plenty of characters that didn't have names in the book or where in the books at all, and yet there were in the movie such as Aslan's second in-command Oreius and the White Witch's General Otmin. Now with Pirates it's not too big of a deal since it's just based on the Disney ride, but it still is in there. all i'm saying is that that is generally unnecessary and they made it even more so with Alice in Wonderland. what makes it unnecessary is that people are more familiar and prefer what the characters are originally called such at the Mad Hatter, the Red Queen and the White Queen, the Dodo Bird, the Chessire Cat, the Doormouse the caterpillar, the White Rabbit, etc. but they do so anyway. The Caterpillar is Absolem, the white rabbit is Nivens McTwisp, the red queen and the white queen are Iracebeth and Mirana, the doormouse is Mallymkun, the Hare, Thackery Earwicket, the Dodo bird is Uilleam. and here's the thing, you only hear people call them by those names for only most of them. some are given a name and are just called by who they originally are, namely the Hatter. the Hatter is named Tarrant Hightopp but everybody just calls him Hatter. that's how pointless these names are. we don't call the Mad Hatter Tarrant Hightopp we call him the HATTER!!! it just seems like the whole time the Hater gets special treatment kind of when it comes to this just because it's the Hatter and that Johnny Depp is playing him. everyone has to be mixed with one thing or the other but while he also has a specific name, THE HATTER STAY'S BEING JUST CALLED THE FREAKING HATTER!!! cause honestly, it's really the people foolishly obsessed with this movie or Johnny Depp or Tim Burton that would want to call people by the specific names. am i right? heck they've even given names on things like the cakes or potions that made Alice either shrink or grow.
2) Another problem i have considering the characters is how either how much or how little the particular Alice in wonderland characters, or otherwise the actors, are in the movie. in a way it's all good and it makes sense to have Alice, the Hatter and the red queen to get all the glory in a sense because they are the more popularly known characters. but while they kinda get the spotlight they deserve, they leave out many characters AND Tim Burton actors that while they aren't the talk of the town, deserve just as much spotlight concerning how we know both just as well. I mean if you see the original Disney film, you have plenty of other characters to love from Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the March Hare, the DodoBird and oh my gosh let's not forget the White Rabbit. but most of these characters are hardly there at all. The DodoBird voiced by Michael Gough whom many burton fans know him only too well in his medium sized parts in movies such as the first two Batman movies and Corpse Bride, had only two lines. The White Rabbit may have a bigger part but he's still left in the dark with his particular part in the story. they don't even give him a purpose to his his classic "I'm late." line at least once. Tweedledee and Tweedledum are there for a small bit. and then Christopher Lee whom we all know too well at least for him work in the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movies, has only too lines himself. seriously.
3) well i'm pretty mixed with the acting. i thought most of it was fine. but there were a few down still.
The Red Queen I thought was the closest to hit her particular part out of everybody. The only problem is that she's acting similar to the Queen of Hearts when her named is the Red Queen which is also an Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass character who has no similar characteristics to the Queen of Hearts besides being a queen.
Johnny Depp and the Hatter i thought was fine, but to me he didn't go the next step so he could blow everyone away. see to me, that's the thing to love about Depp, he generally brings us his usual performance, but while at is, he takes it another step so he can continue to blow us away. now that's not the way will all of his movies, especially not some of his recent roles where he has to just stay at his normal performance like with Public Enemies and The Tourist. and granted, some people have told be that he only did what he was suppose to do based on the Mad Hatter in Through the Looking Glass. But for me i expected him to take that extra step again when it comes to that kind of character, and i'm just disappointed that he didn't.
The girl that played Alice...well...was okay I guess. I guess the thing about her performance is that while the character is still the way she was before as far as being like a child and thinking about things that are total "nonsense". she's not really the same Alice. Really I agree with the Hatter when he said that she "has lost her Muchness" so really what makes the performance okay and something that we should he giving a hard time on the girl about is that they made this Alice someone who has "lost her Muchness", and even then, we don't know what fully expect from the idea of a 19 years old Alice since this is pretty much the first adaption to go outside the story.
and there's plenty to say about everyone else, but frankly i only care to mention those three.
Effects:I thought they were great. i especially like how they made somethings particularity realistic like, such as when the Red Queen wiped the little bit of jelly that was on the lip of that frog. I thought was was very well done. and i thought enlarging the Red Queen's head looked kinda nice. Nothing like either of the queens...but hey, if people like Nickelodeon ever get stupid enough to make a live action movie out of any of their shows were some of not most people have head's bigger than their body's like Jimmy Neutron and Fairly Oddparents, they know what do. (chuckles)...what and idea. that they would so such a stupid thi- oh yeah that's right. they are making a live action Fairly Oddparents movie aren't they? ...excuse me everyone. i'm just going to take some time to lock myself in my room and cry in my bed...
*4 months later*
...okay i'm back. just in time too. i think i almost rid the world of tissues. *sigh* ... okay moving on.
Loyalty to the books: Non-existent. as i might have mentioned before, the big problem with this movie is that they have taken the wonder our of wonderland. everyone and kind of everything has names unnecessarily, many character are seldom and poorly used, and altogether they just made Wonderland like any other Middle-Earth, Narnia, or Harry Potter world-like place.
so that's my review for Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. while i personally like watching it, i dislike it regardless what what they made it out to be in whatever specific ways. so yeah.
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