There are some great things about this movie, but it is ultimately a failure. For reasons that I do not understand, Tim Burton decided to turn the surreal, playful and menacing brilliance of Carroll’s book into the equivalent of a Nintendo side-scrolling videogame.

Don’t get me wrong – Burton’s trademark visual genius is everywhere on display. Your attention to the scenes with the Red Queen is lavishly rewarded with all kinds of charming/terrifying little details like chandeliers held up by exhausted birds. The Queen’s interrogation of her frog footman is exceptionally well realized and darkly hilarious. The problem isn’t with the set design.

The biggest problem is Alice. She’s a cypher. Instead of the plucky tweener of the book, Burton gives us a blank, vapid 20-something. She has the emotional range of a vaguely petulant Guess model, and it takes major effort to concern yourself with her plight. Not only do you not care if she’s successful, but it’s puzzling why so many characters in the movie like her so much. Throughout the movie, the denizens of Underland (apparently everyone got the name of the place wrong) keep reminding her that she was among them before as a young girl. She doesn’t believe them. By the time the movie starts wrapping up, I was hoping that they were all wrong so that a more interesting Alice could be brought in.

The other problem is that Tim Burton somehow thinks that “Alice” is an action movie, and the final boss is the Jabberwocky. The clever wordplay that animates the book is ignored for the sake of big, anticlimactic action sequences.

I say read the books. They hold up insanely well. If you have to watch some Alice, the BBC version and the Disney version are superior in their own ways.