Alice in Wonderland (2010)

Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, first published in 1865, has proved one of the most persistently adapted stories in cinema history, with versions stretching back to a short silent film in 1903. Every generation seems to find a new way in, or occasionally a new way to get lost. Tim Burton's 2010 take, produced by Walt Disney Pictures alongside Roth Films and Team Todd, arrives not as a straight adaptation of Carroll's original but as a sequel of sorts, picking up with a nineteen-year-old Alice who tumbles back into the world she visited as a child, this time against the backdrop of a looming battle for its future. It was released in theatres with considerable fanfare, riding the early wave of post-Avatar enthusiasm for big-budget 3D cinema, and its commercial performance made it one of the higher-profile family releases of that year.

Burton came to the project off the back of a career built on a particular flavour of gothic whimsy, and anyone familiar with his work, including his earlier animated feature Corpse Bride, will recognise the visual grammar immediately: exaggerated silhouettes, washed-out skin tones punctuated by bursts of vivid colour, and a general preference for the strange over the straightforward. The screenplay, written by Linda Woolverton, takes Carroll's characters and drops them into something closer to a conventional fantasy quest structure, which was either a bold reimagining or a fundamental misreading of the source material, depending on where you stand. The production design went to considerable lengths to build a version of Wonderland (or Underland, as the film names it) through a combination of elaborate practical costumes and extensive digital effects, resulting in a look that is polished but unremarkable in hindsight.

The cast assembled here is, on paper, a strong one. Mia Wasikowska takes the lead as Alice, tasked with anchoring a film that could easily spin away from her entirely. Johnny Depp plays the Mad Hatter in a manner that will surprise no one who has followed his collaborations with Burton, leaning into eccentricity as a default mode. Helena Bonham Carter plays the Red Queen with broad, shouty relish, Anne Hathaway brings an ethereal blankness to the White Queen, and Crispin Glover, long a reliable presence when a film needs someone unsettling, appears as the villainous Stayne. For fans of fantasy cinema more broadly, it is worth having a look at how a very different kind of fantasy handles its world-building, as in my review of Viy, or indeed how family-oriented films can carry genuine weight, as I explored when covering The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is undeniably there, all swirling visuals, exaggerated costumes, and a hyper-saturated dreamscape that feels less like a fairy tale and more like a theme park ride designed by a goth teenager. Johnny Depp’s Hatter is pure performance art: twitching, wide-eyed, drowning in green paint and mood swings. It’s strange, yes, but weirdness for its own sake doesn’t make a film interesting, just exhausting. I wanted to like it. I really did. But from the moment Alice floats down that rabbit hole in a glass case while sipping tea, the whole thing feels off, emotionally hollow, narratively confused, and desperately in love with its own quirkiness. The story isn’t really Lewis Carroll’s Alice; it’s a jumbled mess of “franchise-ready” fantasy about a chosen one, a magic sword, and a Dark Knight-style prophecy. Where’s the nonsense? The logic-defying wit? The playful absurdity? Replaced by a generic “hero’s journey” with no soul. The cast is stacked (Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway, Crispin Glover) but they’re trapped in caricatures, shouting over each other in oversized wigs and CGI landscapes that never feel real. The animation and effects are polished, sure, but oppressive, too bright, too busy, too much. There’s no breathing room, no silence, no sense of wonder. Just noise, colour, and Depp doing his best impression of someone having a breakdown. It’s not a complete disaster (there are flashes of Burton’s visual flair) but as a film, it’s a misfire. It misunderstands what makes Alice enduring. It’s not the madness, it’s the mind behind it. This version has neither. Just style without substance, and a story that forgets to be fun. I didn’t like it at all.

And that really is the crux of it for me. Carroll's original works because the strangeness has a point, there is a kind of fierce internal logic to the nonsense, a mind at play rather than a mood board run amok. What I kept thinking about, sitting with this one, is how a film can throw everything at the screen and still feel oddly thin, like a spectacular window display with nothing in the shop. It is a shame, because the ingredients were all there, and there are moments where you catch a glimpse of something that might have been genuinely odd and interesting, before the next CGI set-piece swamps it. Some films earn their chaos. This one just... makes it.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2010  | Watched: 2025-08-07

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Alice in Wonderland (2010) on YouTube

Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Tim Burton: Corpse Bride (2005)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More family: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Wonder (2017) · Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anastasia (1997)
More fantasy: Viy (1967) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)