After a three-year expedition to China, Alice Kingsley (Mia Wasikowska) returns to London and learns that her mother has sold shares in the trading company her family owned and that Alice may lose her ship and her captaincy because of it. However, the heroine’s family problems recede into the background when Alice, having passed through the mirror, finds herself again in the magic land and learns that her friend Hatter (Johnny Depp) suffers from a deadly depression. Only the resurrection of his relatives can comfort Hatter, so Alice goes to the castle of Time (Sacha Baron Cohen) to convince it to let her go back in time and save Hatter’s family from Jabberwocky. When Time flatly refuses to help the girl, Alice steals the time-traveling chronosphere and is transported several years back.
“Tim Burton’s adaptation of Alice in Wonderland!” In 2010, Disney Studios made audiences an offer they couldn’t refuse, and it made Disney more than a billion dollars. However, the commercial success was not a critical success. Burton’s Alice, written by Beauty and the Beast screenwriter Linda Wolverton, was scolded far more than praised.
Perhaps her most offensive departure from the original was her fundamental reshaping of the main character. Woolverton, once brought in to write Beauty and the Beast as an “expert on feminism,” tried to saturate Alice with feminist clichés and turn Miss Kingsley into a symbol of resistance to the patriarchal norms of Victorian England. However, the screenwriter did not see that Alice from the book by Lewis Carroll was already a perfect embodiment of the feminist ideal. What else to call a self-important girl who does what she thinks is right, says what she thinks, and in the climactic scene throws to a red-tape tribunal, “You’re just a deck of cards!”? Just imagine how this was perceived in nineteenth-century England by those who saw “Alice” as more than just a hilarious nonsense fairy tale!
Trying to make Alice more modern, Wolverton significantly weakened the heroine and turned her into a toy in the hands of fate and duty. Miss Kingsley did not reject the ridiculous laws of the magical world. She followed them scrupulously, finding herself “a warrior to run” for the White Queen and her associates. Of course, this is a necessary and noble cause. But Carroll wrote about something else entirely, and his little heroine was far more radical than Mia Wasikowska’s character. Although she didn’t spout any feminist slogans or wave a sword.
Of course, the heroine of a Hollywood movie of the XXI century can not show such disrespect for the feelings of a man with painted fingernails. And so Alice, having thrown all her captaincy out of her head, once again turns into a warrior on the run and goes back in time. Although she knows that she not only commits a crime, but also risks destroying space-time. The fact is that the chronosphere normally powers the universal Clock and ensures the eternal life of Time. Therefore, the very fact of her abduction puts the universe at risk. But the desire to please his friend outweighs common sense. Although whoever, but the captain of the ship should be able to soberly assess the risks.
The above could be considered adult picking on a children’s fairy tale movie if the chronosphere had transported Alice to an amazing world full of bright new characters. But the novelty of “Alice in Looking Glass” begins and ends the moment Alice enters the spectacular castle of Time and meets the owner of the chronosphere and the clockwork robots that serve him. After that, the heroine’s adventures are reduced to visiting the past of people already familiar to the audience, and the audience learns why the Red Queen has a huge head, why the capricious villain hates the Hatter, what in childhood set the Red and the White Queens at odds, and under what circumstances Time cursed the Hatter.
Probably, there are such ardent fans of Burton’s film that they do not sleep nights pondering over such questions. To such viewers the picture will give a long-awaited sound sleep – it is possible that right during the session. But everyone else probably expects much more from “Alice in Wonderland” than nothing like the magical and surprising family sketches from the childhood of the Hatter and the Queens. Lewis Carroll bothered a century and a half ago to come up with an entirely new adventure in an entertaining new world for the second book. And the creators of the $170 million blockbuster offer audiences only childish quarrels and bad falls and suggest they worry about who ate the cookies years ago and didn’t sweep up the crumbs.
When it comes to the climax, however, Alice’s final quest is to get from point A to point B in time C. And no one interferes with her in this. On the contrary, everyone helps her out of the last effort. At least in the first picture, the heroine had to slay the fearsome dragon. Woolverton was not taught that from series to series the obstacles in the way of the heroes should become higher and more insurmountable?