Remember The Neverending Story II? Or the dark and eerie Return to Oz? These “many years” later sequels often have entirely different aesthetic sensibilities than their predecessors. Then you have total saga reinventions like the Tin Man miniseries from a few years back. Both takes on the original fan-favorite have a place in their respective mythology’s timeline, though it’s important to note that in the case of both Wizard of Oz revivals, the target audiences weren’t there when the original, definitive film debuted.
Alice in Wonderland, however, has had numerous revivals over the last few decades. Along with the upcoming Disney owned, Tim Burton directed feature, there have been numerous takes on the classic tale recently, allowing for new audiences to digest it. I suppose it doesn’t hurt that Disney also put out the animated version all those years ago, keeping the story—albeit heavily sobered compared to its trippy source material—in the public consciousness. The Wizard of Oz, besides having an incredibly awful Muppet tribute, and a devoted following to the original film, has had no such efforts made to keep young audiences coming back.
Unfortunately, it’s the average person’s familiarity with the tales of Alice’s adventures through the looking glass, due to new spins on the stories every few years, that ultimately dooms this miniseries. It’s not so much the painfully second-rate special effects or cheesy characterizations that do it in (though they certainly don’t help), but the feeling that this take as a whole has little more than an intriguing frame and not much else holding it up. After all, who can deny that it’s an interesting idea to return to Wonderland after Alice turned the world on its head, ruffled the queen’s feathers, and left everyone scrambling to make sense of her presence? It’s a solid concept. So solid it’s also the basis of Disney’s new version.
In this rendition, tales of the original Alice’s time in Wonderland are known as we know them: through storybooks. So when modern, independent woman and blackbelt Alice (Caterina Scorsone) watches her boyfriend get abducted and chases a white-haired, perpetually late agent of the queen (how obvious can they make the analogy?) into a mirror, she’s not totally caught off guard. Not totally. Able to accept that she’s n Wonderland quite easily, Alice quickly realizes it’s not the one she read about as a child. It seems that since the first Alice left, the world devolved into a dystopian monarchy with an economy based on bottled emotions harvested from “oysters” (people kidnapped from our world into Wonderland). Alice struggles to get a foothold in the world but resolves to find a way to rescue her beau by enlisting the help of Hatter (Andrew Lee Potts), so-named… because he wears a hat. But he’s anything but mad; more emo chic with a brown leather jacket and eyeliner. Hatter promises to help her by calling on the services of the underground resistance and its local leader, the Dodo (Tim Curry). When the Queen of Hearts (Kathy Bates) learns a new Alice has arrived in her kingdom, she sets her favorite bounty hunter, the March Hare (dressed alarmingly like lounge singer Tom Jones), after her.
The adventure culminates in a disappointingly obvious final conflict given only a tiny bit of emotion by a throw-away father-daughter conflict. Every character in the story, at one point or another, comes out and blatantly says their main fault in a line of expository dialogue. It’s enough to drive you mad. Alice? She has trouble trusting people her since her dad left her as a child. Hatter? He’ll do whatever it takes to survive—even if that means betraying his allies. The White Knight? He’s a coward. Rather than show these things straight away, the characters state them and then exhibit them.
With such an interesting world to build off of, why go right back to the same old conventions of the original stories? If you’re going to pay homage to the author’s work, do so and then move on. Don’t spend three hours on it. All Alice does is find slightly new ways to interpret the basic plot of the original. Blaze new trails. Take a hit from the hookah of the caterpillar (who is the legendary, secretive mastermind of the resistance in this) and come up with new ideas as equally outlandish as the original. The throwback nods are cute, but ultimately tired and make this seem half-baked.
The technical faults of Alice are even more egregious. Poor staging, like two characters hiding right around a pillar (painfully visible to both the audience and their pursuers) as their would-be captors just run by. It sounds like nit-picking, and in other films or series that may be the case, but this instance is just so ridiculously awful. Then you have an “army” of soldiers surrounding a – you know what? There’s so much wrong with the editing and direction in this series. If it weren’t for the overall aesthetic design of the sets, which is superb, this series might be utterly unwatchable.
Performances from Kathy Bates and Colm Meaney (her spineless king of a husband) help to bolster some dramatic credibility. Scorsone has enough chops to carry the weight, but co-star Lee Potts definitely shoulders a good portion of the burden. What should be noted is that Tim Curry, having received second name billing on the Blu-ray case, is a joke. He has a five minute role in the first 45 minutes and never shows up again for the rest of the 3-hour runtime. That’s just atrocious.
The Blu-ray hi-def presentation makes the series’ aesthetic design pop, but it also shows some of the shoddy special effects to have the low quality that they do.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
None, how unfortunate.
"Alice" is on sale March 2, 2010 and is rated NR. Fantasy, Sci-Fi. Written and directed by Nick Willing. Starring Andrew Lee Potts, Caterina Scorsone, Colm Meaney, Harry Dean Stanton, Kathy Bates, Matt Frewer, Tim Curry.
