On DVD: Tim Burton Goes Trippy But Tame with Alice in Wonderland

I tend to think ambitious film versions of Alice in Wonderland get produced when there is otherwise a serious lack of good dope: There were only a few trifling TV maladaptions in the '60s, when military-grade hallucinogens were available on every college-town street corner. Today, it's almost impossible to find trip-worthy pharms anywhere, and so we get the most gratuitously outrageous Alice yet, crafted as another tchotchke in Tim Burton's wonder cabinet, and warpingly digital from the top to the bottom of every frame. The movie practically breaks its back trying to deliver an old-fashioned lysergic buzz, and the effort is most of what you walk away admiring. Honestly, Burton's Wonderland looks like a mashup of Hogwarts, Oz, Middle Earth, DisneyWorld, FAO Schwartz and 300's Thermopylae -- nothing has been left out.

Famously, Burton's film departs from Lewis Carroll's books by turning Alice into a marriageable late teen (Mia Wasikowska) -- which would, you'd think, engorge the original's sexual imagery somewhat -- and by molding the story into a Narnia-style saga of fantastical warfare and political intrigue. From every portentous throb of Danny Elfman music and heroic character reappearance (seriously, even Tweedledum and Tweedledee battle the Red Queen's army), there is a Herculean effort to kick some major blockbuster sense into material that by definition makes no sense at all. Who ever thought the Mad Hatter needed a motivational back story? Wasn't it all supposed to be, well, unconscious? Hallucinatory? You cannot, methinks, save your animal friends from an evil army if you're high and hearing your animal friends talk in plummy English accents. It's just wrong.

The irony bubbles out of the movie, but Burton doesn't see it, nor should he, really, since the film has already earned over a billion dollars worldwide and has barely tasted the ancillaries as yet. But the irony belongs to the industry and America and us, finally. We all wanted Carroll's irrational splooge ironed out into a formulaic action narrative, and for our sins there will be many a film like it to come. (Look out -- Brett Ratner's doing Snow White!)

I don't mean to be a party-pooper, but I do mean to be cynical: We're being played like a piano. What would Carroll have thought? However interesting it is to look at -- and it is, in a cluttered, taste-free way, like a gay pride parade or an IMAX marathon of H.R. Pufnstuf -- Burton's Alice is a self-contradiction, a domestication of English literature's most untameable story. Next thing you know, they'll remake Bunuel and Dali's Un Chien Andalou as a romantic comedy.