So I just came back from watching Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland. Now I will say this up front: I love the cast. I mean how could you make a movie with Johnny Depp, Michael Sheen, Anne Hathaway, Stephen Fry, Alan Rickman, Christopher Lee, Timothy Spall, and Crispen Glover not be great?

Let me tell you how, get the worst script you can find and then tell the actors not to actually bring anything new to the characters. For the first time I can actually say that Tim Burton really did not direct this movie well. I think the whole "Oh look what we can do with CGI" phase is now over because of a guy called James Cameron made a movie that had the best CGI ever and everything will seem bad in comparison.

The acting in this movie was not bad exactly, but it was so safe. I mean Johnny Depp played basically the same character he played in Pirates of the Caribbean. He did well as Jack Sparrow because it was so out there and by the third movie the role was getting a little old and annoying. The Mad Hatter took about half a scene to get old and annoying. I have yet to see a version of Alice In Wonderland that I like, which is a little unsettling as I'm in a play version of the book. Also the way the dress sometimes shrunk and stretched with Alice while other times it did not. The Ending was also terrible.

The writing for the beginning of the movie was just terrible. All the characters just basically said what they were thinking and feeling. The scriptwriter didn't even try to make Alice's suitor sympathetic. In fact, the scriptwriter didn't try to make any of the "bad" characters sympathetic. The Red Queen got on my nerves really quickly and Knave was just kind of weird.

On the plus side Anne Hathaway was great as the White Queen and Mia Wasikowska was very good as Alice, she succeed where the previous actresses who have played Alice failed, she made her sympathetic and not annoying.

In short it was a boring, deeply strange, and safe movie. It was highly formulaic when you strip away the odd characters you have hero hates real world, finds weird one, discovers that he/she is the hero of a prophecy and meets a wise old man, he/she doesn't think that they can fulfill it, friend of hero is capture by villain, hero rescues friend, hero escapes to good guy's hideout, hero stills doesn't think that they can do it, mentor tells hero that they can and then dies, hero fights bad guys, hero wins, hero decides to leave the wonderful world where they have been staying and goes back to the far inferior real world solely because it is the "real world"(why can't the nice world be real and the bad world be fake, who decides that one is real and the other isn't?), Hero turns life around and becomes happy, peppy song plays over credits. Tim Burton, you done us wrong this time and what's with Alice not telling her sister that her sister's husband is having at least one affair? What message does that send to your daughter? And while I'm talking about your daughter and messages that are sent to her from this movie, why does Alice have to have a romantic relationship with the Mad Hatter, why do movie heroines always have to have romantic relationships? It's so messed up.