moviemistakes.com

[daguru]

According to this post over at AICN the movie is not really a retelling or reinterpretation of the original stories. Apparently, the movie will take place several years after Alice had her original adventures and gets drawn back in.

Sounds a lot like Return to Oz to me, hopefully it will have a better response.
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[Tailkinker]

Teaser trailer's been doing the rounds on the interweb for a couple of days now after it leaked early, but Disney have been relentlessly chasing it around, shutting it down as much as they could.

However, with the trailer now having officially premiered at Comic-Con, it's now been released properly onto the web in glorious Quicktime and can be found here...
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"If we're going to die, let's die looking like a Peruvian folk band."

[SnowBuddy]

&^*&@#(@*&$*&# Quicktime blows.
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Last edited by Humph on Wed Nov 30, 2005 6:30 am; edited 11 times in total

I'm not short, I'm fun sized.

[Grumpy Scot]

Saw it tonight, it was pretty good.

Depp's Hatter was basically a slightly-more-out-there Willy Wonka with just a touch of Jack Sparrow. It made me slightly concerned that his future roles are all just going to be variations on these two characters. (Whatever happened to Dean Corso?)

Helena Bonham Carter is very fine as the Red Queen. She does a convincing job of portraying the silly, seemingly-harmless-on-the-outside-murderous-nutjob-on-the-inside-character.

I really liked Anne Hathaway as the White Queen. She is very beautiful and seems wise and caring, but you quickly realize, that she's nearly as loony as the Red Queen, though she actually is harmless.

The Cheshire Cat has always been my favorite character in Wonderland and he was fantastically done here.

Mia Wasikowska has a fine career ahead of her, but she's a pretty forgettable Alice. Her Alice glides through the movie rarely showing surprise, fear or any other emotion. She seems more like an unenthusiastic player trying to figure out a puzzle-based computer game than a girl in a bizarre world trying to find her way home.

As for the story, well, SyFy's Alice had the same basic plot of Alice returning to Wonderland and I think they actually did it better than Disney's latest attempt.

The 3-D? Well, it's sharper than 3-D I've seen in the past, but it's still just a gimmick. I don't think it really adds to the movie.

Overall, it's a good film, but certainly not up there with Sleepy Hollow or POTC.
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"Bargained Well and Done "

[BocaDavie]

Yet another movie with so many similarities to a previous film that you could do a synopsis on both… So now, let’s take a look at “Hook” (1991)/”Alice in Wonderland” (2010):
The titular character from the original film is now grown up, and can’t remember any of his/her previous exploits. Maybe it was all just a dream, or perhaps the demands of adulthood have forced him/her to move on and forget the past. Either way, it’s not too long before Peter/Alice is transported back to Neverland/Wonderland and has to deal with all of the eccentric characters from his/her childhood while trying to remember the past. Time is short, though, because a battle is looming with his/her old nemesis, Hook/The Queen of Hearts. His/her only hope is to form an alliance with the Lost Boys/the White Queen.
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The big draw for “Alice in Wonderland”, of course, is Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter (ironic, since six years ago he was “Finding Neverland”) and his teaming up once again with director Tim Burton. The 3D visuals are incredible, but it’s all just a bit too trippy. Rent it.
Finally got the boy (BocaJeremy) to come along... too bad he found it so trippy that it actually became boring for him; he votes "skip it". However, from "Alice" we went to see "Avatar"; first time for him, third time for me. He gave that one a big thumbs up. And... the theater for "Avatar" was even more packed than the one for "Alice".

[BocaDavie]

Took The Wife to see it in 3D this morning after a showing of She's Out of My League. It's unanimous, everyone agrees "rent it". Especially with the poor quality of the 3D visuals. Apparently they decided to convert it to 3D after filming it in 2D, and after seeing movies made for 3D (Avatar, Coraline, Bolt, etc) you can really tell the difference. Alice just doesn't have the depth of an actual 3D film. In the beginning there is a scene at a huge London estate with a couple hundred extras dressed in lavish costumes filling a long stretch of lawn to see Alice get proposed to. If it was filmed in 3D the scene would have looked truly spectacular, instead it just looks flat. And you can see where they tried to add items into the foreground in order to give the illusion of depth. When Alice runs through a forest to escape the Red Queen's henchmen all of the background scenes look flat, except for the occasional CGI branch she runs past that comes towards the camera. If it was filmed in 3D all of the beautifully rendered CGI plants in the forest would look like they're coming off the screen. This does not bode well for other films they are talking about converting into 3D (like Star Wars; Lucas will do ANYTHING to mine more money from that series).
Oddly enough, the 3D previews preceeding the film looked better than Alice, probably because they're for films made in the 3D format. And... oddly enough, there was a 3D commercial for Little Friskies cat food before the film... which also looked better than the visuals in Alice. 3D commercials in the theater? Maybe they have gone too far.

[Phixius]

Awesome. You just saved me four bucks. We want to see this in theaters, but I'm not gonna throw down extra money for a movie that wasn't even intended to be 3D to begin with.
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[Tailkinker]

According to Tim Burton, the only reason he agreed to do it was that it was to be shot in 3D right from the start, because, while the idea of doing something with the Alice In Wonderland story interested him, he felt that it had been done quite enough already - it was only the appeal of creating the film with the 3D effect that finally got him to agree.

While a lot of the current crop are being retrofitted as 3D after-the-fact, I'm not sure that this is actually one of them. It may be that it's just badly done.

But, seriously, Boca, that's all you have to say about it? "Rent it" because the 3D was bad? No commentary on the acting? Without necessarily going into spoilers, how was the storyline? What about the quality of effects disregarding the 3D angle? How did the characters look and move? Details, man, details...
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"If we're going to die, let's die looking like a Peruvian folk band."

[BocaDavie]

The story is all too familiar for anyone acquainted with the books or previous films. She falls down a hole, drinks to get small, eats to get big, and the Red Queen keeps shouting "Off with his head!". All of the characters are done quite well, especially the Cheshire Cat - voiced by Stephen Fry. Odd, when I look him up on IMDb it says he was the narrator on the Harry Potter films. The Potter films had narration? I must have missed something. Speaking of Harry Potter, Alan Rickman (Potter's Professor Snape) does the voice of the Blue Caterpillar, but completely in Snape mode.
Perhaps my disappointment was more with the visuals than with the story, but they do give away far too much at the beginning when they reveal Alice's destiny immediately after she arrives in Underland (the real name of the place, "Wonderland" was what she called it on her first trip there).
If you're a big "Alice" fan by all means see it in the theater, but don't bother paying extra for the 3D.
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Or maybe I'm just jaded against Alice in Wonderland... whenever I think of it I remember this statue:

When I was 5 and my brother Max was 6 (around 1965) we were climbing on it in the middle of summer. He touched a hot spot on the highest point, lost his grip, then fell back and cracked his skull on the metal base.
Nice statue, though... I especially like the Mad Hatter:

If you ever make it to New York City, don't miss it. It's on the east side of Central Park overlooking the boat pond (near the Metropolitan Museum of Art).
There I go playing travel guide again... wrong thread.

[Phixius]

Took Gideon to see it yesterday. He needed some time out with someone he knew, rather than being baby sat by people he rarely sees otherwise.


I saw what Boca meant by the flat backgrounds, but I only really noticed it when the characters were indoors in the very first scenes. After that it all looked like the trailers did[<---EDIT: the trailers before the movie, not the trailers of the movie]. This was my first 3D movie though, so I don't really have a basis for comparison.

Didn't get the Snape vibe from the Caterpillar. It was a much gentler Alan Rickman than I've ever heard before actually.

Also, I didn't really get any Jack Sparrow and only the slightest hint of Wonka from Depp's Hatter. I had heard it said that he wasn't in the movie much at all, but it seemed to me he was in there nearly as much as Alice was once she met him, which was fairly early on.

I do see the similarities between this story and Hook, though. Except Hook had more homage to the original work. In this, the world really reflects the fact that it has seen many hard years since Alice's last visit.

The story did kind of limp along at points though and the ending was very abrupt. Not really much time devoted to a conclusion after the climax. Not that they left any loose ends, just that they sort of slapped the book shut as soon as the last line was read, you know?

Helena Bonham Carter, who I generally like anyway, really surprised me with how much life she gave the Red Queen. I can't name any specific thing, it was just so much "more" than I expected for some reason. Dunno.

I enjoyed it quite a lot. Not as much as I had hoped to. But, for a guy with three young kids and a more than full time job who hardly ever makes it to the theater anymore, I am glad I saw this there.

And Mad Hatter weilding a claymore... reminds me of Hatter Madigan. This wasn't nearly as much like The Looking Glass Wars as I had feared. There's still plenty of room for that movie to get made. Whew.
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I dare do all that may become a man. Who dares more is none.

[OneHappyHusky]

[SnowBuddy]

I have never read the book or watched any of the movies.
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Last edited by Humph on Wed Nov 30, 2005 6:30 am; edited 11 times in total

I'm not short, I'm fun sized.

[BocaDavie]

I was just making the statement about anyone being familiar with the story to explain why I wasn't giving any kind of synopsis... and commenting more on the effects. The story is a mixture of Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass; a synopsis would bore those who are familiar and give spoilers to the uninitiated. I find that reviewers and trailers give away far too much of the plot, so to keep it simple I'll just recommend renting it.

[Phixius]

Contrarily, I'll babysit your kids so you can go see this in theaters, if you are:

A.) Going to go see it today.
B.) Married to me.


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[littlestar]

I didn't like the Disney version or the 1999-version as a kid, mostly because I thought the story was too "out there", I guess, so I don't suppose there's any point in seeing this for me. I'm not too fond of Johnny Depp either, I could never understand why everyone are so crazy about him...
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