The Periscope Post

Tim Burton’s visually intense take on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland had its royal premiere last night at London’s Leicester Square Odeon, despite the driving rain – and Disney’s row with the UK film chain.

The film chain threatened to pull the film, a re-interpretation of the Alice stories featuring a nearly 20-year-old Alice revisiting her old friends in a changed Wonderland, after Disney moved up the film’s DVD release to just three months after the film’s March 5 release. On 24 February, the boycott looked sure, but just a day later, Odeon announced that it had reached an agreement with Disney and would be going ahead with the 3D fantasia as planned.

As its stars claim who inspired them – Anne Hathaway says her unsettlingly ethereal White Queen was inspired by cooking queen Nigella Lawson, while Helena Bonham Carter says her tyrannical Red Queen was taken from her two-year-old daughter – reviews of the film have been mixed, tending toward positive.

The Guardian’s Xan Brooks says that while the film isn’t exactly a deeply nuanced character study, nor does it offer much in terms of plot, it is sumptuous and exciting to watch. “It is a glorious feast for the senses that fades away when the credits roll, leaving barely the trace of a hangover.”

The Times also fell under Alice’s spell, claiming, “Traditionalists may quibble with Burton’s Gothic ride through the Alice books, but his hallucinogenic humour is true to the originals. Plus you don’t get a cast any better than this.”

The Independent joined both The Guardian and The Times in giving the film four out of five stars, but was tempered in its affection, calling it a “wildly inventive film straitjacketed in conventional narrative form” and added that “Burton’s foray to Wonderland is ultimately not as deliriously unfettered as it originally promised to be.” (The same complaint has been levied against his 2005 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, also starring Johnny Depp.)

Variety, on the other hand, wasn’t as enamoured: “Quite like what one would expect from such a match of filmmaker and material and also something less, this “Alice in Wonderland” has its moments of delight, humor and bedazzlement. But it also becomes more ordinary as it goes along, building to a generic battle climax similar to any number of others in CGI-heavy movies of the past few years.” Nor was The Daily Mail, which said the film was wonderful to look at, but ultimately not so fulfilling: “It’s far from brillig.” That, an a little dig at The Guardian, calling the film “a tale of feminist empowerment, with an entrepreneurial, pro-capitalist ending that is unlikely to endear it to readers of The Guardian.”

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