Alice in Wonderland movie

The last version of Alice in Wonderland I watched was an old British version on VHS. It was terrible.

This is a much newer version. It has some big-named people in it including Whoopi Goldberg and Ben Kingsley. It obviously had more money to spend for special effects. It had the Jim Henson special effects shop working for it.

And it's still terrible.

The Alice is more believable in this movie then in the other one, but that's about it. The story itself is sort of put together in bits and pieces, starting with a different premise (Alice is due to sing in front of some people and doesn't want to), then events are bounced around and don't follow the original book in order, then it's back to reality, back to singing and back to Wonderland again, at least for one character that appears in our reality.

The vast majority of the special effects simply don't work. The rabbit was filmed differently in order to make it look nervous (according to the scant comments on the disc; it's not overly generous on special features), but instead it comes off looking like a clockwork mechanism that's had a mechanical meltdown and full spasms at the same time. Many of the characters heads appear disproportionately large in relation to their physical bodies, and the March Hare looks like some kind of horror creature that mated with a rabbit.

The Gryphon is done well, though, and the dormouse and the guinea pigs in the jury box (yes, guinea pigs made up the entire jury) are done well.

As for the acting, the Queen's role is done impressively, conveying the idea that the Queen is quite definitely bonkers. Most of the rest of the roles are ok, but I think that the actors chosen sort of takes attention away from the story. When you have people like Peter Ustinov and Gene Wilder along with the various others you are seeming them in the various roles they played before. None of them have long enough time on the screen to establish themselves as their characters; they are just big-named people doing limited parts. I think relatively unknown actors in the roles would actually have worked better.

The Cheshire Cat doesn't work well optically at all. The face and the body seem totally out of proportion to each other and sometimes it seems that the face was just shot separately and graphically united with the rest of the body, often in a manner that was too obvious.

In short, a movie to avoid.

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