First off, prospective viewers should know that this bears very little relation to Lewis Carroll's works; there are names and situations lifted from both "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass", but the plot only has the thinnest of similarities, and the characters are changed almost out of recognition. The dialogue has virtually nothing of Carroll's cleverness or punning, and the plotting is quite straightforward and conventional, with the ahead-of-its-time absurdist/surrealist flavor of the originals pretty much jettisoned. Now, I've got no real problem with "adaptations" that are very loose, particularly when they're of older stories like these that have already been turned into dozens of other films, TV shows, comics, etc; what's the point of doing "Alice" again if you aren't going to do something new and interesting with it? The question isn't whether it's "faithful", but whether it's good.
So then, if it's not a straightforward adaptation, what is it and what does it give us? We have Alice, a 20-something martial-arts instructor in New York with a boyfriend who tries to give her a special ring as a present, which she rejects as she's not that serious about him yet. He takes off, leaving it behind, and when she goes after him to return it she sees him kidnapped, follows and ends up going through the looking-glass into Wonderland - here mostly a series of skyscrapers with canals running between them and some vaguely steampunk-influenced technology. She quickly meets the Mad Hatter and goes on a seemingly endless series of chases trying to first find her boyfriend, and then defeat the nasty Queen of Hearts (who is of course Kathy Bates) who is stealing people from our world and bottling their emotions as happy drugs. Adventure, action and romance ensue, and lots of really terrible CGI, with the flying pink flamingos being the worst. The acting is mostly mediocre even from professionals like Bates, saddled with a British accent that comes and goes, and Tim Curry who is just there because, well, he's Tim Curry and he gets these kinds of jobs. The great Harry Dean Stanton is also wasted in his 5-minute walk-on as the Caterpillar. "Alice" Caterina Scorsone is good at looking pensive, annoyed and tearful; the only real saving grace here is Matt Frewer as the White Knight - he belongs in a much better film. I can't really blame the other actors much though, they aren't really given any opportunities to develop characters with any sense of reality, even the childish reality of the characters in the original stories.
This is another woeful example of the current throw everything-but-the-kitchen-sink at viewers mentality that seems to infest an awful lot of science fiction and fantasy films in particular. Enough FX and action and we'll forget the plot inconsistencies, poor acting, and half-assed storytelling - at least, one assumes that's what director/writer Nick Willing, the producers and SyFy were thinking. Use a popular, well-known and public-domain property like "Alice" (or "Oz" as in the same people's TIN MAN from 2007), make it "darker", fill it with cute lead actors and the tween girls and boys who are the most desirable demographic won't notice that there's really nothing there. Add in elements of other pop-culture detritus, like THE MATRIX (the Mr. Smith-like Suits, in particular), some 60s-type mod costumes and bright colors for the casino sequences, maybe a bit of BRAZIL and 1984 - or BRAVE NEW WORLD with its similar happy-drug 'Soma" - for the artsy cred, and you've got yourself a movie!
Well, no. You've got yourself a bunch of ill-fitting disparate elements in search of a real story, and I would think that even some of the younger viewers (espcially those who have read Carroll's originals) might see that. Matt Frewer's performance, and the eye candy of Charlotte Sullivan as the Duchess aren't enough to raise this more than a point or so. It needed a coherent, interesting plot and characters, some reason to exist beyond cashing in on Tim Burton's soon-to-be-released film also based on the story - and also featuring a grown-up Alice and a Mad Hatter (played by Johnny Depp) who seems to have been rather influential on the look of the Hatter in this adaptation. But all glossy surface and no meat certainly isn't enough for this viewer, especially when the glossy surface, given SyFy's low budgets and the bland direction of Mr. Willing, isn't all that great to begin with.
So then, if it's not a straightforward adaptation, what is it and what does it give us? We have Alice, a 20-something martial-arts instructor in New York with a boyfriend who tries to give her a special ring as a present, which she rejects as she's not that serious about him yet. He takes off, leaving it behind, and when she goes after him to return it she sees him kidnapped, follows and ends up going through the looking-glass into Wonderland - here mostly a series of skyscrapers with canals running between them and some vaguely steampunk-influenced technology. She quickly meets the Mad Hatter and goes on a seemingly endless series of chases trying to first find her boyfriend, and then defeat the nasty Queen of Hearts (who is of course Kathy Bates) who is stealing people from our world and bottling their emotions as happy drugs. Adventure, action and romance ensue, and lots of really terrible CGI, with the flying pink flamingos being the worst. The acting is mostly mediocre even from professionals like Bates, saddled with a British accent that comes and goes, and Tim Curry who is just there because, well, he's Tim Curry and he gets these kinds of jobs. The great Harry Dean Stanton is also wasted in his 5-minute walk-on as the Caterpillar. "Alice" Caterina Scorsone is good at looking pensive, annoyed and tearful; the only real saving grace here is Matt Frewer as the White Knight - he belongs in a much better film. I can't really blame the other actors much though, they aren't really given any opportunities to develop characters with any sense of reality, even the childish reality of the characters in the original stories.
This is another woeful example of the current throw everything-but-the-kitchen-sink at viewers mentality that seems to infest an awful lot of science fiction and fantasy films in particular. Enough FX and action and we'll forget the plot inconsistencies, poor acting, and half-assed storytelling - at least, one assumes that's what director/writer Nick Willing, the producers and SyFy were thinking. Use a popular, well-known and public-domain property like "Alice" (or "Oz" as in the same people's TIN MAN from 2007), make it "darker", fill it with cute lead actors and the tween girls and boys who are the most desirable demographic won't notice that there's really nothing there. Add in elements of other pop-culture detritus, like THE MATRIX (the Mr. Smith-like Suits, in particular), some 60s-type mod costumes and bright colors for the casino sequences, maybe a bit of BRAZIL and 1984 - or BRAVE NEW WORLD with its similar happy-drug 'Soma" - for the artsy cred, and you've got yourself a movie!
Well, no. You've got yourself a bunch of ill-fitting disparate elements in search of a real story, and I would think that even some of the younger viewers (espcially those who have read Carroll's originals) might see that. Matt Frewer's performance, and the eye candy of Charlotte Sullivan as the Duchess aren't enough to raise this more than a point or so. It needed a coherent, interesting plot and characters, some reason to exist beyond cashing in on Tim Burton's soon-to-be-released film also based on the story - and also featuring a grown-up Alice and a Mad Hatter (played by Johnny Depp) who seems to have been rather influential on the look of the Hatter in this adaptation. But all glossy surface and no meat certainly isn't enough for this viewer, especially when the glossy surface, given SyFy's low budgets and the bland direction of Mr. Willing, isn't all that great to begin with.