Retelling Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, is a popular cottage industry. Just last winter the SyFy Channel aired a miniseries called “Alice.” Marilyn Manson is supposedly making his directorial debut with Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll. A filmed adaptation of the videogame American McGee’s Alice has long been rumored. Frank Beddor recently completed his Wonderland-set trilogy, The Looking Glass Wars, and Zenescope Entertainment spun off a Return to Wonderland limited series from its horror comic, Grimm Fairy Tales.

Mia Wasikowska

Auteur Tim Burton seems like a natural fit to add his artfully twisted spin to this always growing garden of Alices. Shockingly, his might be the least creative, considering the vast amounts of imagination and money lavished upon the film. In Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll’s young heroine is now an adult. This nearing-20 Alice (Mia Wasikowska, That Evening Sun) seeks to escape an arranged engagement to the odious son of her late father’s business partner by again falling into a hole while chasing a tardy white rabbit (v. Michael Sheen).

But Alice does not recall her first visit to Underland (mistakenly referred to as Wonderland by her childish self). She is reintroduced to her former friends—Tweedledee and Tweedledum (Matt Lucas of “Little Britain”), the Blue Caterpillar (v. Alan Rickman), the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) and the Chesire Cat (v. Stephen Fry)—a band of rebels who have spent years searching for the right Alice to overthrow the bigheaded, heartless Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter).

Sounds like a wickedly awesome time, does it not? Sadly, Burton’s Wonderland suffers from a distinct lack of wonder and magic. I can’t even say the family film looks wonderful, as the FX appear fake and lack tangibility. What should be a colorful fantasy land is dulled and muddily gray, which might be an intended consequence of the Red Queen’s rule or an unintended side effect of conversion from 2D to 3D.

Sadly, this Alice has, like the Hatter astutely announces, lost its muchness. This return trip feels less like Tim Burton’s adventures in Wonderland than a Disney approximation of the auteur’s vision.

Drew Wheeler