Finally got around to watching Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland Underland, and I'm really not sure what to think about this movie. On the one hand, maybe it's just lower expectations after well over a year of everyone saying it's crap, but just looking at the movie objectively I can't call it a terrible movie. I wasn't bored watching it, there's a reasonably coherent (if uninteresting) story in play, and Tim Burton brings his twisted artistic look to the film like he hasn't in a long time. And yet, I had a lot of trouble actually watching the movie, and I don't want to watch it ever again.
Maybe the problem starts with Tim Burton's look for the film. The thing that always fascinates me about the best Tim Burton movies is that they make the Strange look Normal and the Normal look Strange, and regardless of whichever it is I always find myself interested in what's on-screen. But in this movie, something just looks...off...about the look of the film, and it makes me increasingly annoyed to keep seeing it. For instance, one of the central designs of the film is the Red Queen, who is extremely short but with a big head. In another Tim Burton film, that contrast would be interesting, but there's just something about it here that makes me want to look away. Ann Hathaway's White Queen is supposed to be a shining beauty, but her design is incredibly unappealing in this movie. I dunno. While some elements of the film look great (the Red Queen's castle), the film overall is just very grim and lacking in visual appeal. There's also some weird continuity errors, like how the Red Queen's personal guard's heart-shaped eyepatch keeps changing colors between scenes.
Then there's Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter. Man, I thought his Willy Wonka performance was terrible, but this is just on a whole other level. For one thing, I'd really like to know what accent he's supposed to be using for this film, because he keeps changing it. In some dialogue scenes, he's doing this quasi-Jack Sparrow voice, while in others he's doing this weird Scottish/Irish hybrid for no apparent reason. I can't understand half the words he's saying because he half-mumbles them, but even when he is coherent he's just not interesting to see on-screen. And like the others, he's just not visually interesting to look at, and his story's not exactly fascinating either. That's just a bit of a problem for a character who's probably on-screen more than Alice herself once he's introduced.
The movie overall isn't a bad movie per say IMO, but it's a very unpleasant one. It's very mean-spirited and never allows itself to bask in the epic splendor you'd think would be a GIVEN in a fantasy movie. And what's with going to all the trouble to bring in Christopher Lee to voice a character who literally has TWO LINES in the entire movie? At least the special effects are nice. Amusingly, near the end of the movie we're shown a "flashback" to Alice's original adventures in Wonderland. Why didn't they just make that movie, because that actually looked a lot more interesting?