Alice in Wonderland

Please note that I haven't read Through the Looking Glass. It might be a good thing to mention.

Cast:

• Alan Rickman reprises his role as an oily slug, renamed from Snape to Absolutum (or something.)
  
• Stephen Fry whispers vacantly while Tim Burton overdoes the CGI on his portrayal of the Cheshire Cat. (Although in reality, they changed the county boundaries, (which I find hilarious), so I refuse to call him anything but the Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat.)
  
• Johnny Depp reprises his role as Captain Jack Sparrow, renamed the Mad Hatter and slathered in clown make-up.
• Mia Wispolishski stares blankly at stuff while being eccentric and daydreamy in a stuffy, strict, and down-to-earth way.

Plot: A young aristocratic woman, Alice, has difficulties conforming to the expectations placed on her by society, instead preferring to imagine and daydream. After being asked for her hand in marriage by a dreary, aristocratic, entitled ponce, she runs down a rabbit hole to a land of wonderment and adventure, in which she has difficulties conforming to the expectations placed on her by society.

First she drinks a potion to make her small, and her dress falls off. Its okay, though, because she has something on underneath that fits her when she’s a tenth of her normal size. I suppose she had a spare change of clothes for a Primordial-Dwarf cousin of hers hidden in an inside pocket, just in case. That, or Victorian underclothes were made of the world’s stretchiest fabric. That idea is proven when she then eats a cake to make her giant sized, and the clothes remain the same size relative to her. She drinks the tiny-potion again, and shrinks back down again, to get through a tiny door.

She meets a bunch of novel (read: ‘book’; not ‘original’) characters, who all insist that she ‘isn’t the right Alice.’ They ask the Absolutum, who also agrees that she is ‘not hardly Alice.’ Nevertheless, she is told that she is foreseen in some prophetic scroll or some such. Then Tim Burton sticks a microphone in Stephen Fry’s face in the middle of the night, lip-synching his half-asleep mumblings with the U A of W Cat. The Cat leads Alice to the (in)famous tea party, with Johnny Depp and a bunch of anthropomorphized animals.

The animals in the book have equal standing with the Hatter dialogue and importance-wise, but in the movie they share the unfortunate predicament of not being played by Johnny Depp, and so are mostly ignored. Grima Wormtongue from the Lord of the Rings shows up and acts all evil. He’s working for the Eeevil Red Queen, who is Eevil. To protect Alice, the Mad Hatter drugs her by making her even tinier, and hides her in a teapot. Apparently, Alice’s Primordial-Dwarf outfit doesn’t fit when she’s tiny, so we get the movies second costume change.

Each of these dresses gets more and more revealing as the movie goes on. Her first dress is a standard Victorian gown, shoulders to floor. Her second dress shows that Victorian codes of morality have a specific exemption for midgets, because the only thing holding it up is a tiny strap that goes around her neck while the flimsy fabric droops on all sides. A mild breeze would up the movie's rating from PG to R. This third dress, tailored by the Hatter in two seconds flat, is literally a spare piece of fabric held up only by being wedged in Alice’s armpits. It has as much modesty as a medium-sized towel.

Eventually, the Mad Hatter refuses to stick inside the one scene Lewis Carroll wrote for him, instead following Alice around for half the movie. He gets captured by the Red Queen, as played by Blackadder II’s Queen Elizabeth, and Alice breaks free of her ‘pre-ordained path’ (presumably the real book’s plot) to go rescue him from the Eeevil queen’s court.

So Alice sneaks through a crack in the Red Queen’s castle’s wall, where she conveniently runs into the White Rabbit, who even more conveniently has some spare Phlebotinum Biggerising cake. Alice’s clothes fall off. (God damn it, Tim Burton, enough already.) Hiding behind a bush, Alice tricks the Red Queen into thinking that she’s just a giant called Um. The Red Queen believes her and dresses her in curtains (Numbah three). She does all this to eventually free Johnny Depp, but when she meets him, he tells her to steal the MacGuffin she needs to slay the Jabberwocky.

Wait.

Okay, uh, you know the poem ‘The Jabberwocky?’ The one with no relation whatsoever to Alice in Wonderland or the universe it inhabits? You don’t? Look it up. Back yet? Good. That’s the plot of the second half of the movie. Alice needs to slay the Jabberwocky, a creature from one of Lewis Carroll’s other works. This makes as much sense as Indiana Jones fighting aliens simply because George Lucas worked on both that and Star Wars.

(OH WAIT.)


EDIT: Sorry, looks like the poem was originally found in Through the Looking Glass. Its just, I like that paragraph, so its a keeper. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

Well, the Jabberwocky is the Red Queen’s pet, and a sword from the poem – the Vorpal Sword – is guarded by a Warg in the Red Queen’s palace. She gets hit on by Grima Wormtongue, who I think is even played by the same actor, though I can’t be sure. She said something to him. I can’t remember the real line, but for all intents and purposes, it was ‘your words are poison, snake.’ Whatever. Alice steals the Vorpal Sword, and runs off, hoping that Captain Jack Sparrow-clown – still held prisoner in the Queen’s dungeon – will engineer some kind of Rube Goldberg style escape.

In other words, she consigned him to beheading. ‘Thanks for rescuing me, Hatter, hope we meet again some time, good luck with that execution business, kthnxbai,’ *runs off into sunset on Warg.*

The Warg, a digital model stolen pixel-for-pixel from The Lord of the Rings, rides to Minas Tirith, where the Red Queen’s nemesis Anne Hathaway lives. There, she changes into a spare Rivendell outfit left over from the filming of You-Know-What. Alice hands Excalibur to the Queen of Gondor (complete, if you’ll notice, with White Tree designs on the pillars of the gleaming white throne room), and is reminded that she’s prophesised to kill a giant monster, no ‘buts’, no backing out, Missy.

I really object to this. She goes from being carefree and eccentric at the beginning of the movie to this, where she doesn’t want to follow the path predesignated for her, to the end of the movie, where a much kinder, much floatier matron figure pressures her into a much less pleasant, much more dangerous path, we’re supposed to agree that she take it.

There are deliberate cinematic parallels between the scene where she is pressured into marrying Lord Tosser and the scene where she is pressured into becoming the champion of Wonderland. The crowd of people wearing white, the framing made by either the gazebo or the archway, the fact that when Alice rejects it, she runs into a garden ‘exit stage left’. (Reference, don’t worry.) The theme of this movie is therefore the joys and wonders of doing as you’re told.

Nevertheless, in the garden she runs into The Orac—sorry, the Absolutum, who tells her that she was The On—sorry, the Real Alice all along (along with being A Real Boy, having it Inside Her All Along, the truth that she Is The Greatest Clich—Dragonslayer In The Land, and the fact that all she needed to do was chant There’s No Place Like Home to get back to her boring, unhappy life. Accompanied by a sourin—sorry—soaring violin piece by Carl—sorry— John Williams.)

Encouraged by this little prep-speech by a cynical bong-head caterpillar, Alice dons the Armor of the Champion as the Gondor Army marches to the Black Gate. (Incidentally, it took me a while, but I realized that the Gondor Army all look like Chess Pieces, with similar motifs at play in the towers of Minas Tirith/Disney Castle. The Red Queen’s hordes are all cards. I no, rite?)

So the two armies meet on a big chessboard. The White Queen volunteers Alice as her champion – now wearing a form-fitting suit of armour – while the Red Queen calls the much-anticipated Jabberwocky.

It’s a fucking Nazgul.

It’s different enough not to be homage, but similar enough to be unmistakably a fell beast, ripped right from the pages of Jackson’s concept artbook. Once more for emphasis: It. Is. A. Nazgul. Sure enough, the final battle plays out exactly like the equivalent of the Lord of the Rings one. They swordfight, and just as the pale, blonde woman wearing Gondor armour is losing, an eccentrically dressed redhead more used to tea parties than warfare comes along and stabs it in the tail. This distracts the beast for long enough for the unlikely warrior-woman to hack its head off. The monster says at one point ‘No man can beat me.’ The young lady chaffing under the sexism of her culture spouts a one-liner in response. Shortly after, an airy-fairy elf-lady gets crowned queen. I wasn’t sure, but I could have sworn the Jabberwocky was played by Christopher Lee. All we were missing were well-fed little-people with hairy feet, so similar in characterization that it’s difficult to tell them apart.

OH WAIT.

At the end, Good Witch Glenda asspulls a Magic Go-Home Plot Device, and Alice must choose between a comfortable position in a magical land, surrounded by friends and well-wishers, and going home to a place where everyone treats her like expendable crap, expected to marry for pecuniary gain. Take three freaking guesses which one she chooses.

Alice emerges from the Rabbit hole, having learned nothing from her adventure. Instead of doing what’s expected of her for the good of her friends and family, she blows off the ennobled Lord Twat and delivers curt moral messages to all and sundry, before running off with a mustachioed pensioner to begin a new life of financial rapacity in the Far East.

Okay, she takes after her father by going into business, but she’s going into business with China. If you think this is a good ending, you know nothing of history. Once Britain opened up the Chinese market to the European powers in the late 18^th century, they screwed it over. They pushed opium down the throats of the rural poor to the point that China went to war with Britain to stop the tradeflow. Alice Kingsley – in this movie – is implied to become rich with trade with China. You know what the result of Ms Kingsley’s new-found self worth was? The Opium wars, death toll 50,000.

That war resulted in a protectionist policy in China, which stunted Chinese economic growth for the next 50 years. The majority of that deflected trade went to Japan. Japan took advantage of its neighbours weakness to invade in 1936. This emboldened them to attack elsewhere.

I’m not going to suggest that Alice Kingsley indirectly blew up Pearl Harbour, but she certainly hastened the process. But hey, as long as she lived happily ever after, right?

I still recommend seeing the movie though. I like picking apart movies as much as watching them, so take these reviews with a generous handful of salt.