Alice in Wonderland

So we went to see Alice in Wonderland this weekend. I know – I’m a little slow on this one. But I’m lucky I got to see it in theaters at all!

Simply because this film was directed by Tim Burton and had Johnny Depp in it, I was expecting it be rather odd and creepy. Almost off the wall kind of stuff. I even wondered about bringing a young person along because I didn’t know how creepy/scary it might be. Bleh. All that thought was for nothing. We’re so accustomed to the story, that the odd things are familiar to us now. In a way, the director was going for this sense of familiarity because Alice is actually making a second trip back into Wonderland. He uses the same reliable characters and their interesting ways of talking and thinking. It was like greeting old friends for Alice and the audience.

I’ll get into some more heavy commentary after the spoiler warning but for those who haven’t yet seen it and don’t want to continue reading this blog, let me just surmise my opinion and say that this movie didn’t live up to my hopes. There were some funny parts and some new things, but overall, it’s didn’t make it on my top 20 list like I expected it to.

SPOILERS

For those of you who have seen the movie, or who don’t care about spoilers, I’m going to make some brief statements on a few observations.

Being married is like being eaten by a Jabberwocky. Alice runs away from Hamish’s proposal. She is being socially pressured into marrying him just as she later is socially pressured into wielding the sword and killing the Jabberwocky. Perhaps the statement is just about being married to someone you don’t care about but since she really didn’t have any other love interests, I’m extending this message to being married in general. Especially since in the end, she sails away off on her own as a businesswoman, I’m prone to thinking that marriage at all is being passed off as a bad thing.

Of course we all got the message of her needing to transform into a butterfly like the caterpillar does. In this film, the transformation isn’t from ugly duckling to beauty queen but an actually next step in her life. She needed to become an adult. This doesn’t mean get married like most Disney movies or other family films might portray. In this film, it means being able to stand up to the social pressures of those who might want you to go certain directions in life. It means being able to decide where you want to go and who you want to be.

Johnny Depp likes to channel certain aspects about his characters that make them stand out compared to others. He does this with Jack Sparrow and his always woozy drunk-like state and the creepiness of Willy Wonka. For the Mad Hatter, Depp primarily used a difference in his accents/speech patterns. He tried to make the Mad Hatter seem more mad by channeling different personalities, made obvious by the accents and speech patterns. This didn’t work that well for him. It wasn’t strong or obvious enough and it just made me wonder if he had been messing up throughout the whole film at first. It just didn’t work how he wanted it to.

This last idea I haven’t had a lot of time to develop, but I’ll throw it out to anyone who is bored enough to have actually read this far in my post. What do you think is the significance of the games used by the queens? The White Queen used chess in all her decor and the soldiers. The Red Queen used card games. What role did these (usually adult) games play in the film?