Alice in Wonderland

On paper, this looks amazing. Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland remains a classic of children's literature (read it again, if you haven't recently: it's still as dark and funny as you remember) and director Tim Burton has a glorious sense of creepy whimsy that would appear to gel perfectly with the source material. And with a cast helmed by regular Burton stars Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter and featuring superb supporting players – Crispin Glover, Alan Rickman, Stephen Fry, Imelda Staunton, Christopher Lee, Michael "Frost/Nixon" Sheen, Matt "Little Britain" Lucas – it all looks like a classic-in-waiting.

Then you remember something important: Burton's films are as insubstantial as candyfloss. The man's made some memorable movies – Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Big Fish – but when was the last time that you could genuinely say you loved a Burton film? The loud, busy Charlie & The Chocolate Factory? The Nightmare Before Christmas-style afterthought of Corpse Bride? The ill-conceived stage musical Sweeney Todd?

This sorta-kinda sequel to the classic tale sees Alice (played by blank-faced Australian Mia Wasikowska) at 21 years of age and about to be thrust into a high society marriage she doesn't want, when she falls down the rabbit hole (again). Cue a bunch of scenes from the books repurposed to cover the new thrust of the plot – Alice finding her "muchness", making it a standard coming-of-age story – with a quest to save "Underland" from the ravages of the Red Queen (Bonham Carter) and her toadying Knave of Hearts (Glover) by slaying the Jabberwocky (voiced by Lee) and reinstating the White Queen (played by Anne Hathaway, once again inspiring the question "why do people cast Anne Hathaway?"). Key to this is the Mad Hatter (Depp), Tweedles Dee and Dum (Lucas), the Cheshire Cat and the White Rabbit (voiced by Fry and Sheen, respectively) with hyperactive CG doing most of the heavy lifting.

The production design is great, especially the Jabberwock (which is based upon the classic illustrations by John Tenniel), but the constant re-purposing of Carroll's wonderful language is grating: the Jabberwock must be slain on the "Frabjous day", for irritating example. Similarly, the attempts to create new Carrollian terms (like the Hatter performing the "Futterwacken" dance, which looks like a third-rate Michael Jackson impersonation) is irksome in the extreme. And, at the risk of giving the ending away, Alice's destiny seems less like a symbol of fearless independence and more like a celebration of colonialist imperialism, at least to anyone with the vaguest knowledge of Anglo-Sino history in the lead up to the Opium Wars.

Sure, Alice in Wonderland turned out to be Burton's most successful film to date; but did it really have to destroy some of literature's greatest characters in the process?

Extras Featurettes: The Mad Hatter, Finding Alice, Effecting Wonderland

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