This is why it’s such a disappointment when we discover how ordinary it all is. Tim Burton has stated that he never had any interest in telling the original Alice stories (Lewis Carroll’s masterpieces Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and, What Alice Found There), and instead forms his film as a sequel to all the adaptations that have come before of both books. Alice is nineteen, choked by her Victorian setting and dreading her intended marriage to Lord Ascot, a cartoonish prig who is not interested in contemplating impossible things. Then, as he is about to propose to Alice in front of a waiting crowd, Alice spots the White Rabbit and chases him down the rabbit hole.

However, once she gets to Wonderland (here named Underland), even though she has no memory of her initial visit, she repeats her journey and actions and dialogue almost exactly. She Drinks Me, Eats Me, and grows and shrinks, states “Curiouser and curiouser” and meets up with old friends like the Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, the March Hare, and, of course, the Mad Hatter. They tell her, if she is the Alice that came before, that she must kill the Red Queen’s Jabberwocky, thus returning Underland to the power of the benevolent White Queen. This prophecy is further confirmed by a magic scroll that shows the ending of the film.

So Alice wanders about Underland in the sort of episodic nature that distanced Burton from the source material to begin with, and then ends with the prophetic battle between her and the Jabberwocky. There’s never any real question that she won’t defeat the creature, even if several characters doubt Alice’s ability. They doubt her only because they doubt her identity, but the audience knows she is in fact the real Alice, and thus will be successful in the final battle. The only joys of the script are the occasional appearances of characters we already know, doing nothing especially new – at least nothing new that works. The Mad Hatter is given a much built-up dance, the Fuderwhack, that he states he will do upon the death of the Jabberwocky. All through the film, characters say how much they are looking forward to his Fuderwhacking, and honestly, there’s more anticipation for this dance than Alice’s slaying of the Jabberwock. And then, when we finally get to see the dance, it turns out to be the Mad Hatter break dancing with CG enhancements (head spinning in circles), and, as cringeworthy as it is, it’s also surprisingly short after all the build-up. It’s like the old joke: the food here is terrible, and the portions are too small. This entire dance, and all references to it, should have been edited out entirely.

For one, Alice has no strong motivation. She’s played competently enough by Mia Wasikowska, and her performance grounds the fil m in what have been a greenscreen wasteland. But her character is la cking. There are hints of what might have been earlier, better choices of motivation in the previous drafts of the script. There are a few elements that suggests unless Alice does go back to Underland, she may end up not only si ngle but insane in the real world. But then this is revamped as the story goes along, and Alice seems to have more feminist intentions, wanting to prove to herself that she can make her own path. It’s confused, and we’re never really sure why she has to kill the Jabberwocky or save the residents of Underland from a Red Queen she believes is a part of her dream. Whether Underland is Alice’s dream or reality is a question that the film not only leaves open, but confuses within itself. And whether it is real, or at least, whether Alice believes it is real, is an essential question to answer when determining her motivation killing the Jabberwocky, which in this version don’t really make sense.

Johnny Depp, the perennial Tim Burton favorite, has more freedom with his Mad Hatter, a character with clearer concerns. He wants his safety in Underland back, and urges Alice along to help him. He is the only person in Underland who immediately recognizes Alice as herself, and becomes her clownish mentor through the journey. Depp isn’t given much to do, but he’s easily the most realized character in the film.

The Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), with her enlarged head and substantial palace, fails to create any real threat as the villain of the film. She screams for beheadings, but it’s more of a catch-phrase than a source of conflict, and appears to have finished all her actual evil before the film started. Burton casts an ensemble of talent for the smaller roles – Michael Sheen as the White Rabbit, Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat, Crispin Glover as the Knave of Hearts, Alan Rickman as the Blue Caterpillar – but the only cameo that feels like more of a character than a design is Anne Hathaway as the White Queen. If she had been the villain, the film might have been more fun. Burton based her character on the British cooking show host Nigella Lawson, whose sweetness and beauty hid an inner madness (at least, according to Burton). The Red Queen merely cut off heads; we can only imagine the twisted killings the White Queen would have carried out. A ruthless character masked by social pleasantries would have fit the Victorian suffocation Alice had tried to overcome as well.

This also goes back to what made the source material work: in the originals, everyone in Wonderland was an antagonist. There was no one helping Alice, and she was forced to be assertive and independent in order to get anything done. Here, Alice has it too easy. She’s told where to go, what to slay, and who to trust. It makes Underland quite underwhelming.

The visual palette is less reminiscent of the gothic, drizzly grays and blacks of Burton’s Sleepy Hollow or Sweeney Todd, and more like the oversaturated Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Underland is as brightly colored as a Rainforest Café giftshop, with the neon greens of the foliage and the fluorescent oranges of the Mad Hatter’s hair. Despite occasional glimpses of clouded skies and the requisite Burton fog, it feels like a children’s play center. Even Disney’s Alice in Wonderland had a moody purple and deep green to its landscape, but Burton’s world feels much more cartoonish.

We also don’t get the inventive use of camera angles that Burton usually employs. Gone are the extreme high and low shots inspired by German Expressionism, and instead we get fairly bland compositions that simply frame the action without comment. Although, this blandness is most obvious within Underland, and probably due to the extensive use of greenscreen technology. Burton is a director that seems to need a physical place in order to place his camera effectively, and hopefully he’ll return to real-world locations for his future projects.

But what Burton is famous for, despite his pleas to the contrary, is his art direction. Fans relish the slanted look of his worlds, the expressionist sets and gothic wardrobes. But in Alice in Wonderland, Underland looks surprisingly generic. There are a few Burtonesque touches – the heads floating in the bloody moat of the Red Queen’s palace, the twisted trees and broken iron gates – but the majority looks like a standard children’s fantasy film. It's a beautiful fantasy, but not really at the level audiences have come to expect from Burton. Even his films set in the real world tend to have more character to their environments, and you’d think with a surreal dream world, Burton would be free to go wild. There are some good concepts here, but their execution is more professional than exceptional. Even the White Queen’s castle, its design clearly modeled after the castles in Disney theme parks, doesn’t make use of this comparison in any sort of ironic or creative way. (Image 7) She’s a queen, she lives in a castle. It’s as simple as that.

Alice changes wardrobe as frequently as she changes size, and the variations on her standard blue dress are quite interesting, and she has a wardrobe to make Tim Burton fans proud. The Mad Hatter also has a different look than past incarnations, a gothic Bozo the Clown with pastel colorings. His is probably the best character design of the film.

As expected, Danny Elfman scores the film. “Alice’s Theme,” while not Elfman’s best by any means, has an excitement to it and survives listening outside of the context of the film, but there isn’t much else of note on the soundtrack.

Although the film was envisioned in 3D, it was not shot with 3D cameras, but converted afterwards. This is fine for most of the computerized landscapes of Underland, but several of the early scenes in the real world have a pop-up book feel to them, flat characters spread over a 3D plane. The constant resizing of Alice is well done, as well as her placement into a fabricated world, but it is always obvious which elements are real actors and which animated or manipulated characters. The Red Queen’s design features Helena Bonham Carter’s head enlarged, and this is mostly successful. There is one scene where she rests her head against the Knave, and it doesn’t feel like it has the weight such a large head ought to, and in general it’s not a very impressive effect. It merely looks like good Photoshop work.