james_nicoll

It pains me to say bad things about a Tim Burton film, but I really, really hated the heavy-handed "and then the heroine learns to stand up for herself and Become A Man^WWoman" bookending for that.

Also, the 3D was woeful.

The 3D was awful, mainly because the movie wasn't meant to be 3D in the first place, it was added on post production. At least that's what I heard. Like the Clash of the Titan's remake.

I've heard suggestions the industry may be starting to realise that cheap-and-nasty post-production "3D" is in danger of giving the technology a bad name. I certainly hope they're learning that lesson.

That wasn't even the biggest problem with "Alice in Wonderland". The biggest problem was that it was a movie with a coherent plot, an easily-identifiable hero and an easily-identifiable villain. For any other story that would be perfectly okay, but for Alice in Wonderland? That's an unforgivable blunder.

The Alice universe is entirely dream-based, so it's more-or-less required to be entirely non-sequiturs with people doing more-or-less senseless things that add up to a plot merely by a sort of escalation. The fact that everything in Tim Burton's movie happened as a direct consequence of something that happened beforehand made it a failure as an adapation--or even a derived work--of the original Alice stories.

Also, I definitely agree with you that the 3D sucked.

The odd thing is, as far as I can tell, that seems to have been Burton's purpose in making the movie. He disliked Alice because it had no plot, so he gave it one.

It's a lot like the join-everything-into-one-shared-world impulse in elderly science-fiction writers.

I will forgive a lot of adaptation if the end result is, in itself, a good story. I thought both 'Where The Wild Things Are' and 'Talented Mr. Ripley' were good movies, even though they were a long way from their parents in mood. I felt some of the changes to LotR improved on Tolkien's story, and others were appropriate for turning a book into a film (others, I could have done without).

So I wouldn't have minded that Burton turned Alice into Hero's Journey, except that it was a bad hero's journey (albeit with some lovely visual design).

with people doing more-or-less senseless things

Not entirely senseless; an awful lot of it is metaphor for various philosophical arguments, but I never expected that part of it to survive adaptation.