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Down the Rabbit Hole

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It took me over a year to decide that I did want to watch this movie. And I am glad I did. This isn’t your normal, Disney animated Alice in Wonderland. This is Tim Burton’s version of Alice and her travels down the rabbit hole and his version and imagination is a little scary at times.

The movie starts with a flashback to when she was a little girl and her father was trying to convince people of a fantastical idea. She had a bad dream and her father comes to her room to comfort her. She says she saw a purple cat, a hatter, and a white rabbit with a clock. Her father tells her it was just a dream and she goes to bed.  The movie then jumps 13 years into the future. Alice is in a garden for a party that secretly (at least to Alice) is an engagement party because a lord is about to ask Alice to marry him.  Everyone is excited for Alice, telling her so, but the frown and unhappiness on Alice’s face is the exact opposite. She doesn’t know what to think and everyone is telling her what to think and what to do. Before the proposal comes, her imagination is peaked when she seeks a white rabbit following her. As she is getting proposed to, she sees the white rabbit again and instead of accepting, she runs after the white rabbit and falls down the hole into “Wonderland.” The catch here is the audience hears someone talking saying, “this isn’t the right Alice, why isn’t she remembering?” We then realize that this is the second time Alice has been to “Wonderland” but she doesn’t know it yet. And Tim Burton used both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass to make his version of Alice in Wonderland.

Newcomer Mia Wasikowska does a great job blending the fairy tale with a darker, more depressed version of Alice together. However, the only reason why she is depressed is because everyone is telling her how to live, how to act and who to be. When she tries to tell people of her imagination and things otherworldly, like her father did, they dismiss her and say she is being childish. Growing old doesn’t mean you need to stop believing. That is why Alice goes down the rabbit hole. Everyone told her how to act, who to marry but she didn’t want to. She wanted to do things on her own terms and in her own way, find the way on her own. But when she went down the rabbit hole, she couldn’t remember that she had ever been down there before because her mind was clouded by what everyone in the real world was telling her to do and be.  Mia plays the innocent Alice well and when the story needs the heroine, she turns that part on and becomes someone who is strong, independent and can rely on herself no matter what challenges are put in front of her.

Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter was quite enjoyable. He was crazier than ever going from a sweet hatter to a dark and deadly one in a matter of moments. He was hard to watch at some points as he looked like he was about the kill everything and everyone in his path. He did put the Mad in Mad Hatter.

But through everything and everyone in the movie, the one who gets all of the credit is Tim Burton, who’s Master of the Absurd, Over-The-Top, Fanatical status does it yet again. He takes every aspect of the fairy tale that we grew up with from Disney and the books and makes them darker, more mysterious and scarier than ever before. Depp and Burton are never a good combination if doing a children’s story because once they are done, it is never a movie for children. I was even a little scared at times and I laughed at the Disney one. But I have to applaud Burton and his imagination; he can take an innocent, sweet movie and turn it into something dark, spooky and mysterious and yet pleasurable to watch. 

This movie gets 4/5 because honestly, Johnny Depp did scare me a little J

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