Alice in Wonderland

 Alice's adventures played like a series of encounters with characters whose purpose was to tease, puzzle and torment her.  Tim Burton's new 3-D version of "Alice in Wonderland" answers many a childish question. This has never been a children's story. There's even a little sadism embedded in Carroll's fantasy. It reminds me of uncles who tickle their nieces until they scream. "Alice" plays better as an adult hallucination, which is how Burton rather brilliantly interprets it until a pointless third act flies off the rails. It was a wise idea by Burton and his screenwriter, Linda Woolverton, to devise a reason that Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is now a grown girl in her late teens, revisiting a Wonderland that remains much the same, as fantasy worlds must always do.
     Burton is above all a brilliant visual artist, and his film is a pleasure to regard.  He brings to Carroll's characters an appearance that is distinctive and original. These are not retreads of familiar cartoon images. They're grotesques, as they should be, from the hydrocephalic forehead of the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) to Tweedledee and Tweedledum (Matt Lucas), who seem to have been stepped on. Wonderland itself is not limited to necessary props, such as a tree limb for the Cheshire Cat and a hookah for the Caterpillar, but extends indefinitely as an alarming undergrowth beneath a lowering sky. The landscape was designed by Robert Stromberg of "Avatar."
     When we meet her again, Alice has decidedly mixed feelings about her original trip down the rabbit hole, but begins to recall Wonderland more favourably as she's threatened with an arranged marriage to Hamish Ascot (Leo Bill), a conceited snot-nose twit. At the moment of truth in the wedding ceremony, she impulsively scampers away to follow another rabbit down another rabbit hole and finds below that she is actually remembered from her previous visit.
     Burton shows us Wonderland as a perturbing place where the inhabitants exist for little apparent reason other than to be peculiar and obnoxious. Do they reproduce? Most species seem to have only one member, as if nature quit while she was ahead. The Mad Hatter, played by Johnny Depp, is  that rare actor who can treat the most bizarre characters with perfect gravity.
     This is a Wonderland that holds perils for Alice, played by Wasikowska with beauty and pluck. The Red Queen wishes her ill, and the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) wishes her well. To be sure, the insecure White Queen doesn't exhaust herself in making Alice welcome. The Queens, the Mad Hatter, Alice, the Knave of Hearts (Crispin Glover) and presumably Tweedledee and Tweedledum are versions of humans; the others are animated, voiced with great zest by such as Stephen Fry (Cheshire), Alan Rickman (Absolem the Caterpillar), Michael Sheen (White Rabbit), Christopher Lee (Jabberwocky), Timothy Spall (Bayard) and Barbara Windsor (Dormouse).
     The third act dissolves it into routine and the boring action of every conceivable battle sequence, duel, all carnage, countless showdowns and all-too-long fights to the finish.