'Alice' SYFY Movie Review

A Review______________________________________________________

"ALICE"     a SyFy Channel Original Movie.
                  (first broadcast Dec. 6 & 7, 2009)  

          Very little remains of Lewis Carroll's companion children's tales Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871) in this "re-imagining" of the classic story. Younger humans might enjoy the funny costumes worn by the characters in this long and labored exercise in ersatz kookiness and cleverness.  Older humans and adults, especially those familiar with the Carroll originals, will probably be bored and greatly disappointed.  Only some character names and costumes are carried over from Carroll.  The "re-imagined" narrative has replaced the scenes of inspired madness from the original story with karate fights, gun fights and explosions in another slow-paced quest through an enchanted (Canadian non-union) woods and a vertigo-inducing Wonderland, both settings created with the extremely pedestrian CGI effects so favored by the SyFy Channel.  This Alice has a phobia of heights, which fits nicely with the simple infinite "stacking" CGI effect that has become a cliché in low-budget sci-fi fare.  That's the main problem with this "Alice" – most of the story seems to have been written around what most expediently fits SyFy's limited CGI possibilities.  The result is a far cry from anything exuding a "sense of wonder."  And the inclusion of a hokey "power corrupts"/"fight the power" message as a means of justifying the out-of-place mild karate and gun violence in a children's tale (without which the "wild and crazy" storyline would have been even less kinetic and even more enervating) is almost insulting.
          The "illogical logic" of Alice's adventures that makes the Carroll stories so timelessly engaging is entirely missing in this version.  Instead, the writer-director sends Alice through a maze of sets and scenarios that seem to have been inspired in equal parts by Stanley Kubrick and 60's film sets.  If only these were equally that ingenious!  This "homage" only makes one long to watch those movies again, just as it makes one long to read the Lewis Carroll novels again.  The musical score is also an endless sound-alike referencing of late 60s/early 70s pop radio (Deep Purple's "Hush", ad infinitum).  The Tweedledum and Tweedledee characters even torment Alice against a backdrop of lava lamp effects.  What this running hipster 60s motif is all about seems pointless rather than inventively clever.  Even the White Knight would appear to have come into this production via "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."  The only "updating" all the way to 2009 is that Alice is old enough to be fielding marriage proposals, she's working out the mystery concerning her missing father, and her love interest, the Mad Hatter (!), isn't mad at all in this version – he's a Jonas Brother clone made to order to match Alice's "Gossip Girl" persona.   That is not to be taken as a knock against either the Jonas Brothers or Gossip Girl.
          One essential of any great fairy tale is that it makes you want to believe.  That's not possible when in every moment you get the nagging feeling that nobody involved really cared about the story they were telling.  It even permeates in the way SyFy Channel gives away what's going to happen next in their "coming up" preview clips at the commercial breaks, completely spoiling the fun of the cliffhanger ending of the scene we just saw!  C'mon!  Are you kidding me?!  Even more than the lazy and uninspired storytelling throughout "Alice", this sort of treatment and presentation of a tale of wonderment is what's really disheartening…
           The medium is the message.  And sadly, SyFy, we get it: It's just another piece of product.  Beyond that, nobody really cared.  I really wish this had been a wonderful re-imagining of one of my favorite classics.  I guess my hopes of greatness are now tied to the upcoming Burton/Depp 3D extravaganza.