Alice in Wonderland

Overview

Tim Burton's obsessively anticipated adaptation of Alice in Wonderland finally hits cinemas in all its three-dimensional glory. Burton has transformed Lewis Carroll's Alice Kingsley into a 19-year-old dreamer (played by Australian Mia Wasikowska), who flees a claustrophobically staged engagement to follow one of her flights of fancy and ends up falling down the proverbial rabbit hole.

This is not to say that Alice is a stranger to Wonderland; indeed, she dreams of it constantly, though remains unaware of her childhood adventure to 'Underland'. And so Alice and the audience are reintroduced to all the old favourites: the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), the Rabbit (Michael Sheen), Tweedledum and Tweedledee (Matt Lucas), the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry) and the trippy Blue Caterpillar (Alan Rickman).

While Burton and screenwriter Linda Woolverton (Beauty and the Beast) do a laudable job reinventing the literary heroine, they don't quite manage to breathe new life into her. In fact, apart from a spirited scene or two, Alice is a rather flat, meek character who literally sits on the sidelines of scenes to allow Depp and Bonham Carter to dish up their quirk. That his muse and his wife would run away with the production was always going to be the risk of Burton's Alice; if they do just manage to restrain themselves, Burton isn't able to convert this into a winning emotional journey for his heroine.

Despite these distracting characterisation flaws, Alice in Wonderland is a well-paced, beautifully crafted visual spectacle that makes good use of 3D for a cracking cinematic experience. Alice's costumes are particularly delectable, and, as ever, Burton's signature gothic stamp is a resplendent, atmospheric addition to this latest world he's set his sights on.