So on Friday the wife and I went to see Alice in Wonderland 3D at a mini “imax” in Wimbledon, SW London. My wife is a massive fan of Burton, Depp, Helena and in particular Alice in Wonderland. She has a shrine of AiW stuff at our house and we’ve visited Lewis Carol’s grave which isn’t far from where we live.
We had pretty good seats in the middle, pretty much ideal for the 3D thing.
Overall I thought it was fun and interesting, but it didn’t blow me away. I think the fundamental problem for me was that as a film it was principly an exercise in eye candy, style and characterisation. As opposed to say plot or dramatic tension. (This is something I feel is true about a lot of Tim Burton stuff). Which isn’t necesarily a bad thing, but does mean you are dependent on your visuals to carry the thing.
Certainly the design and characterisation were fabulous. Johnny Depp in particular did an amazing job as the hatter, and most of the characters were very vibrant and distinctive. Similarly the visual design was amazing with Tim’s usual fabulous detail.
Where I think it underwhelmed though was in the eye candy stakes, with or without consideration of 3D. What makes it worse is that I think it would have been a lot more impressive if it had come out 6 months ago, i.e. before Avatar raised the bar so high for this sort of thing.
I don’t just mean 3D, but the heavily computerised characters and landscape in general. Tim was pulling a lot of the same tricks that James Cameron did in Avatar. e.g. the mapping of actors onto CGI bodies was essentially the same as in Avatar, the 100% CGI sets they lived in, a completely digital world, etc. The problem was that the execution wasn’t as good. You could ‘see the joins’ where Matt Lucas’ face was mapped onto Tweedledee and Tweedledum and some of the characters didn’t look ‘natural’ within the world they inhabited (by which I mean convincing within what they are). Especially for me the Knave of Hearts, who moved awkwardly and to me often looked like a cardboard cut out floating around the scene (ropey 3D may have been to blame here). Even allowing for how ‘out there’ this is, I never found myself lost in suspension of disbelief, which I did for pretty much all of Avatar.
I think the scene which really brought it home to me was when Alice was walking through an amazingly colourful garden of flowers and mushrooms, not long after arriving in Underland. The colours and detail was gorgeous and this should have been a real stand out moment for the design and CGI. Except that Avatar had a very similar scene walking through the Naavi jungle, which completely blew this one away.
All of which wouldn’t really matter, I don’t just go to the movies for eye candy, except that there wasn’t a lot of plot to pick up the slack. So you ended up with a lot of interesting and well portrayed characters living in a world which is good, but in the back of your mind you know isn’t as good as it could have been, and progressing down a fairly linear and unchallenging story.
The 3D also wasn’t IMO as well executed, mostly because it fell back on the old ‘throw things at the camera’ tricks more often than not, rather than just sitting in the background and helping to immerse you in the story, they way Avatar did. The other thing I felt was that the 3D was a bit off and in places I found I couldn’t make out the detail as well because of it, which was a shame given that detail is something Tim does so well. I’m actually looking forwards to seeing this in 2D HD on Blu Ray, as I suspect it will look richer for it.
Sorry to sound like such an Avatar fanboy, but my overall impression was that Tim slightly fell between two stools here. If he’d released this a year ago I think he would have got a lot of acclaim for the new territory he was breaking in visual effects, but he’s missed that boat. Conversely, if he’d waited and was starting it now, I suspect he would have looked at what James Cameron did with the technology and been inspired to make a film which looked twice as good as this one does. I think the technical brilliance of Avatar coupled with the vision and style of Tim Burton would be an amazing thing to see.
As it is, it was an interesting film to see and I’m glad we went to it in the cinema (as if my wife was ever going to miss it, she already has her ticket for the proper imax). But it’s not going to stick in my mind and stay with me the way some films do, which is a shame.
