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Dammit Tim Burton! Dammit! The Nostalgia Critic reviews 2010’s Alice in Wonderland.
Tagged with: 2010 alice in wonderland channel awesome disney doug walker movies nostalgia critic tamara chambers
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I only liked this movie because of its visuals. (I was in my Alice Madness Returns and loved the dark Wonderland stuff)
Eh, Critic; you’re not gonna like this one… Not only are they making a sequel to the Alice in Wonderland remake called Through the Looking Glass (Yeah, we’re finally getting the sequel by the wrong guy we want it from!), but they’re also making a sequel to Beetlejuice in that same timeframe! I swear to Palutena and Poseidon that’s not a joke!
The only hope is that Tim Burton doesn’t seem to be involved in the next Alice at all. He isn’t showing up anywhere on the IMDB page. Sadly, we still have the same gal as Alice.
The movie wasn’t saying “Alice was Alice”… no duh. The point of that scene was that Alice had forgotten the events from the book and she was now remembering them. It was never supposed to be a question whether she was the real Alice, it was a question of whether or not she would remember it.
Also… (sorry, I still like this movie) but you say that one might be expecting this to be a remake of the original and might be confused by the title… but the poster also shows her as an adult… and the trailers clearly show that the plot is different. How would you get confused by that? Also, the title “Alice in Wonderland” isn’t incorrect… she is still Alice. Just because she is grown up it doesn’t make her any less Alice.
This movie definitely has a bunch of flaws, but about half of the flaws in this video don’t even make sense… they aren’t even correct flaws, it is simply you misinterpreting what the plot is and what is going on.
while I agree with the arguments you brought up, I don’t see how half the flaws addressed in the video are wrong or how he’s misinterpreting the plot.
Totally agree. Still haven’t found ANY bad Burton movie.
Was Tamara’s Malice a reference to American McGee’s Alice? Am I that old? Do I only ask rhetorical questions?
aaalright I was honestly a bit afraid to watch this review of yours. Because while I can work with you talking shit about things I like, there are things I wasn’t sure about. I am always one saying, you should always see that this videos are comedy first, but if I am one thing, it’s a fangirl of a few things. One is…. well you Doug. The other major thing is Johnny Depp and Tim Burton. I just can’t work with people talking bad about them, because I enjoy them so much. I know it’s silly, it’s just me. But I am haplpy with the video as it is really 🙂
I want to visit Burtonland rrrreeeeaaaallllyyyy badly, and it was quite fun actually. Some things I can maybe relucantly agree on, some I won’t but that’s not the point. It was fun, and I thank you for that. 🙂
Doug, since you’ve mentioned Big Eyes at the end, could you do an episode on it as well? I am really curious about your and Rob’s opinions on this movie. Or, maybe, you could do a Sibling Rivalry episode, or an editorial, or a special. Thank you!
Wow. Burton really went to town in his takeover of Wackyland…
This may not be the starring role, but when talking about a black character being a main character, you forgot Byron Williams from Mar’s Attacks. His role is a very solid role, helping other characters survive the alien invasion, and he is given a pretty good back story. The boxer that just didn’t make it to the top of his league, now down on his luck and has to work at a Las Vegas casino to help support his (ex? It has been some time since I last saw this movie) wife and kids. His character mattered so much to the movie that he was given a back story and an ending when he (SPOILERS, but then again the movie is almost 20 years old so if you haven’t seen it what are you waiting for? And dear lord, almost 20 years old?!?! I’m old as dirt) reunites with his family. So Tim Burton has had a black character as one of the main characters, but when thinking about this I must agree that Byron Williams is the ONLY main black character that comes to mind. Damn Burton, what’s up with that?
Quote from wikipedia Batman 1989 article.
“Tim Burton chose Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent because he wanted to include the villain Two-Face in a future film using the concept of an African-American Two-Face for the black and white concept, but Tommy Lee Jones was later cast in the role for Batman Forever, which disappointed Williams.”
What Tim Burton film will you review next?
tbh I don’t even care about the book and HAAATE this movie with a burning passion.
Nothing and nobody is likeable, the acting is boring, the visuals look disgusting …just pure loathing man.
I hope that Doug realizes that, much like in Sleepy Hollow, there’s a really brilliant commentary to this movie that doesn’t shine through unless you know about it, and that the underlying story isn’t a happy ending, but a sick girl getting sicker. But let’s first look at a fellow named American McGee.
A game designer back in the late 90s, the unlikely named American McGee was a game designer who took the original Alice in Wonderland story and created (you guessed it) a videogame based off it. Widely considered the spiritual sequel to it, 2000’s American McGee’s Alice in Wonderland was a dark sequel to the whimsy of Carroll’s our heroine goes crazy. After her family dies (similar to how the father dies), Alice begins losing touch with reality until she’s sent to an institute. After years and growing up into a teenager, the white rabbit comes and brings her back to wonderland. However, in McGee’s Alice, Wonderland is twisted and dark, having been taken over by the Red Queen and the Jabberwock (again, like the movie). Here’s pretty much where Burton’s movie and McGee’s game diverge.
Now look at Burton’s movie with THAT as the source material. This isn’t a young girl whimsically exploring her imagination, but instead as a sick young woman who lost her father and was forced into a world of prim and proper pomp. And you see the movie through her point of view in the world. The real world is bland and colorless, distinctly different from the scene with her father. Everything’s gone flat, even the roses are white when they should be red. It’s clear that something in her life isn’t right. Whether it’s really as bland and boring as she sees, we don’t know. We see it as boring, bland, and flat because she does.
And when her boring life is interrupted by her encouraged to be married off to a life of eternal boredom, she escapes to where else but Wonderland (or underland? No, that’s a stupid freaking change and even I’ll admit it). Now, depending on whether you see this as Carroll did, with her falling asleep and imagining, or McGee and she’s seeing things and having a mental breakdown, the undertones of the story are very different. Now this is a young woman who’s lost her source of inspiration and a sense of belonging when her father died. More so, she’s a teen, or at least early twenties. What do people in this age group put above all else? The feeling of belonging and being needed. And what does she find? That not only are these very NOT-normal characters accepting her, but they also happen to need her.
Looking at it as a young woman escaping reality in a delusion, we see a lot of things in a different sense. Her insistence that the whole experience is a dream is a healthy one. She knows that what she’s seeing isn’t real. And that IS a healthy mindset. Most people get that odd sensation where something’s under their skin. Most people know it’s not actually something in their skin, but instead just an itch. But imagine if someone felt that and didn’t think it was just an itch but in fact a bug burrowing through their arm? They’d really hurt themselves… And that’s why her accepting the dream as reality isn’t a happy ending. And we see the dark hints play out in the ending with the appearance of Absalom in reality. If we’re seeing it through her eyes, she honestly believes Wonderland is real and not a figment of her imagination.
Both McGee and Carroll play around with the idea of reality and fantasy. The last line in the books is Carroll saying that life may be a dream. But when a young woman, grieving her father, begins seeing things in real life, we start swaying more towards the insane more than the imaginative. We see her “come out of it” only to immediately push for exploration
But, just like Sleepy Hollow, there’s a clue that I think absolutely proves that this is what Burton was going for. Mia Wasikowska, the actress who plays Alice, is has won multiple awards in Australia and around the world. See some of her other work and you see she can emote. But here, even when hurt or flying through the air, she doesn’t have a spark of emotion on her face. She goes on a tirade to the dog about how she’s been accused of being some woman and she’s going to be forced to fight to the death with a monster. And she doesn’t emote! This is Tim freaking Burton, not Uwe Boll! That’s more than just bad directing. So why is this nominated actress (who won an AFI award for best actress for this role) apparently actively resisting the urge to emote? This is the answer and the biggest flag as to why this is a reimagining of McGee instead of the original Carroll.
Negative Affect.
In schizophrenia, patients can experience a difficulty connecting their emotions to their emoting. A person could have lost their puppy and have difficulty showing a thing. They can’t laugh at jokes, even if they enjoy them and think they’re funny. And that’s Alice in this movie. It goes beyond bad acting or bad directing. Compare it to Jaden Smith and Shyamalan in After Earth, who have emoting that’s overstated in places and understated in others. Here, no matter what happens, Alice’s face barely twitches. She’s actively resisting the urge to act like a healthy human! How awesome is that? To get across what she wants and is feeling without so much as raising her eyebrows?! As a way to show the difficulties of Schizophrenia, they put a HUGE handicap on the LEADING actress. And she pulled it off beautifully and won Best Actress at the AFI for it.
Linda Woolverton, who wrote the script for Burton, also made two other superhits for Disney and Doug loves them both. Get this, the writer for this movie also wrote the original scripts for both Beauty and the Beast AND Lion King. Can you really say that the powerhouses behind Beauty and the Beast and Nightmare before Christmas really combined to create a crappy war movie?
I applaud those who read this whole thing and I hope it finds it’s way into Doug’s hands because this movie is really worth looking at again with a new respect for it. Have a great day and maybe imagine a few crazy things yourself.
Personally, i don’t think this is really what was intended and that you’re probably reading too deep into it. But, this is a fascinating theory and even if it’s not what was intended, it can’t stop you from seeing it that way and having a better experience for it, so good on ya lol.