I could have done without all that part, honestly.
Alice (Mia Wasikowska) runs away, following a white rabbit in a waistcoat down a hole, falling down down down, landing on a chandelier and then on the floor. We see Alice trying to open five locked doors, then she finds a key and tries to unlock said locked doors… more seconds wasted.
Finally she finds the little door and the drink-me drink and the eat-me little cake, and enters Wonderland. Now, Wonderland is really a land of wonders, full of bright colors, lovely. She meets various characters: the dormouse, lovely, doubts she’s the right Alice. The talking flowers wonder who she is, the white rabbit is puzzled because he searched all Alices and thought of having found the right one.. the Blue Caterpillar (with the amazing voice of Alan Rickman) doesn’t give her a definite answer, whether she’s the right Alice or not, because she seems unsure of herself, basically allowing her to find out who she is by herself :-) Apparently there is a prophetic scroll that states that she’s the chosen one to slay the Red Queen’s Jabberwocky, the terrible beast that she used to take the power and keep everyone in fear, but she doesn’t think she could slay anything even if she wanted to. They all have to run when the Knave of Hearts sets his beast on them: Alice’s arm is hurt, but she escapes thanks to the dormouse that takes away one of its eyes.
Next Alice meets the adorable Cheshire Cat with its big grin, and it leads her to the Mad Hatter (a very colourful Johnny Depp, with a little squeaky voice when he plays the mad companion, and a funny/scary voice with a sort of Scot accent when he talks serious things like battles :-D ) who says he’d recognize her anywhere, that she’s the right Alice.
The March Hare seems like a raggedy Roger Rabbit when it pulls its ears :-p The Knave of Hearts (Crispin Glover: funny how I only saw him in one movie, the Back to the Future one, and yet as soon as I saw him I knew him immediately, found him so familiar…) is hunting her down, but the Hatter protects her and is arrested for it. Now very very little, with a cute little dress he made for her, he sits her on his hat and make her fly on it to safety :-) Instead of going to the White Queen, she’s all: this is my dream and I decide what to do! She rides the hound back to the Red Queen’s castle, she becomes very big and therefore accepted in her castle, because the queen has a soft spot for people with big body parts (the Red Queen-Helena Bonham Carter seems rather small but with a big big head, and yet later we see she’s as tall as the White Queen-Anne Hathaway… anyway, one of the things I didn’t like: the red queen was to fake, I would have preferred to see the actress, definitely, while the white queen was so… cold, with bad makeup - why, oh why, does she have such dark makeup despite being so white? White skin, white hair, white dress, and terribly dark makeup… :-/ she walked as if she was some kind of ethereal fairy, but I didn’t like her at all. I don’t approve but I can understand why her sister the red queen became mean out of jealousy, since everybody liked the white-one better and mocked her for her head :-/ )
There’s a nice scene here when the hatter is making hats for the red queen and is all happy of doing his job again, until Alice notices what a pity it is that he has to do it for her , and he comes back to himself, realizing that’s true… they talk, he tells her that she has to find the Sword and also why does she have to be always too small or too big? :-p
Alice finds the Sword inside the beast’s doghouse, and manages to get it by giving the poor thing back its eye, so they become friends. She takes the Sword, and rides the beast out of there and is off to the White Queen’s castle with the hound. The Hatter and the dormouse are to be executed (Off with their heads! :-p) but the Cheshire Cat saves them. The Hatter incites a rebellion against the queen, but she sets her big bird on them: the ones we know make it out free, though. Hatter, dormouse, and the hound’s family join Alice at the White Queen’s castle. She tells Alice that it’s entirely her choice (she doesn’t look so angelic, though :-/ She is the good one in the story and yet I didn’t like her or trusted her :-/ ); Alice is scared, runs away and finds the dying caterpillar, and she learns who she is, and remembers all the other times she’s been in Wonderland before as a child, those were not dreams at all it’d seem, she was there!
At this point she wears the armor that was prepared for her and joins them into battle. The Red Army is made of red playing-cards in armor, while the White Army is made of chess-pieces-soldiers. The two sisters talk, and again I felt more for the red one, who thinks it’s better to be feared than loved because nobody loves her or has ever loved her…
There has to be a battle between their two champions: the Jabberwocky for the red, Alice for the white, but when the Hatter tries to help her breaking the rules, the two armies battle each other. :-/ I didn’t like the battle.
Alice wins, of course, and the White one banishes her sister forever, along with her Knave, who tries to kill her :-/ poor red-one, she thought he was the only one that loved her… :-(
Unfortunately here for some reason, maybe it was supposed to be the funny moment of the show, the Hatter does a stupid impossible dance, and Alice will feel the need to do it herself in front of her bewildered mother and everybody at that party :-/
They say goodbye, Alice says she can’t stay because she has questions to answer and things to do, and goes back to her real life, just moments after she went away. She comes out of the hole with her blue dress that she was wearing when Hamish proposed, only it’s all dirty. She’s more confident now: she says she can’t marry him, reassures her mother she’ll find something to do with her life, and starts working with Hamish’s father, as a young businesswoman… yeah, right. I mean, I like the message, but given the period and the age and the class-difference (I don’t know her father’s position in society, but still..), this last thing seems more unlikely than a flower talking or a wise caterpillar…
I mean, the movie was beautiful to see, the colours were beautiful, the short scene of child-Alice in Wonderland was lovely, and yet it lacked heart, it lacked the empathy with the cause, I never felt like I wanted to help and protect the White-one. She seemed like the popular girl, ever so pretty, that you expect to turn mean at every turn and are surprised that she doesn’t. I knew it, and yet I felt like: so she’s really the good one? Seriously??
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