I’d been looking forward to seeing the new Tim Burton directed Alice in Wonderland for ages constantly checking the Imax website for the release of tickets to the opening day. I shouldn’t have bothered. The movie was a great disappointment and even being shot in 3D didn’t save it any from an entertainment value.

Ironically I’ve read that Tim Burton said he felt that the original Wonderland story was like a series of events that all happened to centre around a girl wandering around from one weird character. He said he never felt a connection emotionally and therefore in his version he wanted it to flow more like a story. Unfortunately I didn’t feel that he’d succeeded in his goal.

From the beginning I didn’t feel that the story flowed. It felt terribly disjointed and I didn’t feel any kind of emotional connection with any of the characters, except perhaps for Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Queen – and she’s supposed to be the evil one! Alice returns to Wonderland as a 19 year old, 13 years after she first visited, and it is told that she’s the only one that can save the white kingdom from the red queen’s clutches by killing her Jabberwocky. Alice doesn’t remember any of her previous visit and stumbles from one character to another trying to do what I don’t know. She just seems to be led around by whoever she meets and therefore I cannot understand how suddenly toward the back end of the movie she has formed strong relationships with those on the white side such as the Hatter, Absolem the Caterpillar, and Chessur.

Even taking the characters individually I didn’t find any of them appealing, except perhaps the Bandersnatch, who is supposed to be this scary horrible creature but actually turns out to be rather sweet: Alice was impolite and imperious, the White Queen was affected, Dormouse was irritating, and the Hatter, though admittedly supposedly mad, was way odd.

From a stellar cast and director I was definitely expecting more. Ho hum.