Alice in Wonderland - now in 2D!

This is one of those films that when it came out I wasn't particularly interested in, mainly because I've never seen what's so amazing about the Alice in Wonderland story but also because I was having one of my more militant anti-3D phases at the time. I found myself proved right yesterday as I watched the film in the classic 2 dimensional format without silly glasses and without a £2 charge for the privilege of having a screen force false perspective on my eyes.

The film is the story of Alice returning to wonderland. She is 13 years older than the original story and now about to be married off. However - she's a modern-thinking girl in a bygone age so despite all the trappings and social conventions of her time she eschews her suitor and runs off to think about her future. Within seconds she spots a magic rabbit and has fallen down a big hole into what fans of the book will no doubt recognise as yet another adaptation of their favourite story. When she falls down the hole I was baffled by several odd moments when the camera focuses on inconsequential things such as a piano flying at Alice. We then get an Alice-eye-view of the piano. It took me several seconds to work out that of course in the 3D version of the film the piano probably flew out at people and induced a number of yelps from the yokels. The effect was totally lost on the 2D screen.

From that moment on I think the movie was fairly lost on me. I watched the whole thing with one part of my brain systematically cataloguing the bits of the film that exist purely to make 3D tech look good. For example, there's a part when Alice flies through the air on the Mad Hatter's hat with lots of swooping and things flying past her. It's as if people making 3D films can't think of any way of making the tech improve their film, so they're resorting to just chucking stuff at the screen.

It's not that Alice in Wonderland doesn't have its merits. I'm a self-stated rookie when it comes to the Alice story, but even I can appreciate what Tim Burton has done here. As you would expect from a Tim Burton re-envisioning of the Alice story, everything has been stylised and warped into a darkened and slightly crazy version of the original. You've got Helena Bonham Carter screeching her way through her lines, Johnny Depp letting rip his insanity and an intriguing redesign of the Alice character, here a gothic stylised sword and sorcery heroine complete with pale white skin and a destiny to slay the dragon. And he's certainly sexed the character up too; all those dresses that keep falling off her? Indeed.

Aside from the styling there's not really anything that happens in this film. Alice goes here, talks to odd people, goes there and talks to mad people, becomes tall then small then tall then normal-sized and then decides to 'save' wonderland from a queen that the locals all acquise to. I don't get why this inconsequential wackiness is that interesting, which probably means I was never really going to warm to it. I think this is going to have to go down as my least favourite Tim Burton film.