Alice in Wonderland "a mischmasch and a mess", says Lewis Carroll expert

Will Brooker on Alice in Wonderland

Ten years before he published Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll wrote a regular magazine for his family called Mischmasch - it is a good word to describe Tim Burton's new film.
 
Burton misch-mashes elements from Wonderland with its 1871 sequel, Through The Looking-Glass, and Carroll's poem, The Hunting of the Snark.  What's more surprising, and less forgivable - in that it threatens to disrupt any of the film's remaining coherence - is his manic plundering of so many other devices from recent popular culture. So Bonham-Carter's Red Queen is a reprise of Miranda Richardson's spoiled, lispy, squeakily screechy Queenie from Blackadder. Depp's Hatter, a charmingly eccentric fop with a penchant for funny voices and eye make-up, is just a hop and a skip from Captain Jack Sparrow. The armies of computer-generated warriors and the flying beasts to be tamed and mounted are all a bit too reminiscent of recent cinematic spectacles, from Lucas' soulless Star Wars prequels through Harry Potter and the Narnia films - to Cameron's Avatar.
 
Carroll's Alice has often been interpreted as an allegory for growing up and the trials of adolescence, from the bewildering rules of adult society and the rudeness of petulant, childish grown-ups to the embarrassing lack of control over your own body. Burton's Alice, with its nineteen year-old protagonist, is also a story about growing up, but it adds a lesson about finding your own way and resisting the plans others might have made for you, even if that means not being entirely ladylike.
 
There's an added edge of sexuality, too, as Alice's clothes frequently fall off her or rip from her body, and she models a series of outfits like it's Wonderland Fashion Week; but her last costume is not another pretty dress, but a sleek suit of armour. As she walks out to face her demon, she finds the confidence to propose a business partnership instead of marriage.
 
It's a cute, original ending, mildly inspirational for an audience of twenty-first century tweenage girls. But for most of the film, Burton throws all his cards in randomly; flinging down tricks and twists and hoping one of them will stick. His Alice tries to be about almost everything - every popular character, icon and motif of recent film and television - and so it feels like it's about nothing, except the modern experience of sampling and surfing without ever getting beyond the superficial. More than anything, it's Alice as a videogame - literally borrowing from American McGee's PC game of 2000 in its story and imagery - and of course, inevitably, it will become a videogame, with all that jumping, swooping and lunging transformed into the medium where it really belongs. This Alice is more of an avatar than a character; she's better suited to being controlled with a joystick than to moving a story forward.
 
Burton has forgotten, or failed to realise, that if you strip away the specifics of Carroll's book - the language, the puzzles, the peculiar sense of something sinister beneath the surface - you end up with generic, unremarkable fantasy. A talking cat, a knight, a girl, a man in a hat. These aren't the fundamentals of Alice; they aren't why the character has survived a hundred and fifty years. Burton's film is a mash-up, a mischmasch; it's much of a muchness, and a bit of a mess.

Will Brooker is the head of the Film and Television Department at Kingston University in South West London, and the author of Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture (2004).