Alice in Wonderland (2010)

I thought this movie was just "blah".

Wasn't horrible, wasn't awesome, just middle-of-the-road.


This being a Tim Burton movie, I was expecting dark. The movie is just, well, relatively dark grey.

Even though this is a sequel to the original Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, which is a neat way of casting an older actress for Alice, the storyline is pretty much the same the first half, since Alice doesn't remember being in Underland (apparently she misheard it first time around) and has to go through most of everything again. Journey of rediscovery, perhaps?

The characters are the highlight of the film, even though Johnny Depp's recycling Willy Wonka with an English accent and shocking red hair. The Futterwacken dance when everything's won was, um, loopy. And not in a good way. Crispin Glover was underutilized, as with every movie he's been in (except for Willard, which would've been boring for me if it weren't for him), and more Knave of Hearts would've been fantastic.

The few final scenes where she tells her family and the rest of English society that she wants to make her own destiny was clichéd and... so '90's. It felt forced and out-of-place, since this is a Tim Burton movie after all.

6/10. Watch it for Underland, for the landscape and its inhabitants. No one really cares about Alice.

Oh, side note: Danny Elfman can do no wrong.