Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland: Yet another monomyth.

I was expecting much more muchiness from this character. The joke will, of course, be lost on those of you who haven't seen the film. I apologise.

The title of this film is a little misleading as it is more closely based on the events of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and even this textual foundation is shaky.

This might seem to be an odd point to comment on in the first sentence of a review, and it would be, if the sentence’s only relevance was to the literary origins of the film. However, This sentence manages to perfectly surmise a few of the key problems with burton’s adaption of Carroll’s literary classic.

Firstly, the fact that, despite the film being predominantly based on Through the Looking Glass, The title Alice in Wonderland still remains indicates disney’s desire to capitalise on what has become an interpretive franchise. People will flock to the cinemas to see a classic revisited, but might think twice, or perhaps a third, before doing the same for a little mentioned associated text (yes I realise that many interpretations of Alice incorporate elements of both texts.)

Lewis Carroll was a mathematician, he wrote his surreal, absurdist odysseys as an escape from the inherently systematic quality of his professional work. The books are driven by word play, astoundingly crafted imagery, and wry social comments. Lewis used the texts as a vessel for the expression of his ideas that could not be adequately articulated through his work in the field of mathematics.

For Carroll, even plot seemed too great a systematic burden; consequently, there is very little development of character or narrative progression in either Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass. Interestingly Alice’s role isn’t so much a traditional protagonist, whose character is informed by the events of plot, as an oracle through which the reader perceives Carroll’s surreal imagery and divines the wit behind his word games. She is the readers portal, the justification of  text. She isn’t not important to the structure or development of text in any meaningful way. She rarely contributes a word.

Burton chooses to ignore the important role this quality of Alice’s character in creating Carroll’s trademark ubiquitous whimsy. Instead he crafts a neo-feminist monomyth that echoes oddly of 1980′s adaptions of Neil Gaiman novel.

Monomyth refers to a basic pattern found in many narratives, it goes ”A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Also note, Neil Gaiman is a noted proponent of monomyth style narratives. His Novels were also adapted for film extensively with some very dubious results.

I’ve heard a bunch of people justify any shortcomings this film may have in terms of plot saying things like ”oh, but the imagery is fantastic” or ”look at the production values.” But this line of debate is tantamount to suggesting we should judge a film based on its budget. something I’m sure we’d all agree wouldn’t really be something we’d want to do if we wanted to maintain critical credibility.

I should some clean however and say that I had pretty high expectations of this film, being a long term Burton-Depp fan. So this expectation might have something to do with my dispointment.

It’s not a bad film, it’s just not the great film it could and should have been.

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