Well, here we go. Anyone who knows me or follows my Twitter or whatever will know this wasn’t in any danger of becoming one of my favourite takes on Lewis Carroll’s story, but I swear I didn’t go into it entirely closed minded.

The problems start right at the top, and again I knew this well before watching a minute of the actual movie. This simply shouldn’t carry the title “Alice in Wonderland”, and the usage is clearly a marketing decision… “Disney’s Alice in Wonderland by Tim Burton” sounds like “Kerching!” right? You’ll know already perhaps that it is not the usual straight retelling of Carroll’s story but finds Alice 13 years later returning to the land of Red Queen, Mad Hatter, and White Rabbit Return to Oz/*Hook*-style etc. What you might not know is that Linda Woolverton’s screenplay has brought manic obsessive order to Carroll’s completely inconsistent nonsense land, now called Underland and populated with creatures and artefacts all of which have outrageous names, encylopedia entries and backstory.

In short, this movie not only substantially but literally removes the Wonder from Wonderland. I wish I was the kind of person who welcomed the substitution of Carroll’s imagination with Burton’s extravagant visuals but I’m not. This movie reminded me of watching Richard Kelly’s director’s cut of Donnie Darko which destroyed the original movie by telling the audience what it was supposed to mean. Everything looks as you expect from an Alice movie, the production design is up there with the best of them; but there’s such desperation to shed light on every nook and cranny, to explain everything so that your brain doesn’t have to work at all let alone a little, that even in 3D (I watched in 2D) it’s bound to come up flat to anyone who truly cares about art, to say nothing of the many fans of Carroll’s original work (it scares me, however, how many people clearly call themselves Alice fans without ever having actually read the text…)

The worst of this for me wasn’t any of this, however. The worst of it is, to my surprise, Mia Wasikowska is actually a pretty great Alice. Yes, she’s older, but we’ve covered why that is and it’s a problem all its own that isn’t limited to this production. She would’ve been a fine Alice even if they’d just told the original story age be-damned as so many Alice adaptations have (my fave, Fiona Fullerton, and the not-too-bad Kate Beckinsale Through the Looking Glass, eg). And though my love of Johnny Depp has slid with every Pirate sequel he’s added to his resumé, I didn’t find his Hatter at all as annoying as I expected (stupid WTF dance in the final reel notwithstanding). The scenes between the two of them, particularly the one where Depp questions, frightened, “Have I gone mad, Alice?” are almost all of them heartbreaking to behold. Here, Burton moves the camera in on his actors, he stops showing off his visuals… there are shadows both physical and psychological, and the movie actually starts to become something.

It’s not enough by far, though. I might just be set in my ways on the subject but I’ve seen tons of Alice adaptations and no take on the story has yet made me feel so utterly convinced as this one that Lewis Carroll would literally cry if he heard about it (particularly the action-packed finale in which Alice slays the jabberwocky amidst a Lord of the Rings like battle…really) which I’m sure many people don’t really care about anyway. It struck me when the movie flashes back upon Alice’s original visit to “Underland” and they use a younger actress of the correct age that it would’ve been nice if, while shooting these small scenes, they had just gone ahead and had a second crew film the whole original book/s as a side project. It then occurred to me that the problem then would be that I fear many kids falling for this new vision would view such a thing as a prequel. And that’s just about enough about how much this movie depressed me.