The wizards behind "Merlin" and "The Odyssey" combine Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" into a three-hour special that just gets curiouser and curiouser.
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19-year-old Alice returns to the magical world from her childhood adventure, where she reunites with her old friends and learns of her true destiny: to end the Red Queen's reign of terror.
Director:
Tim Burton
Stars:
Johnny Depp,
Mia Wasikowska,
Helena Bonham Carter
Upon moving into the run-down Spiderwick Estate with their mother, twin brothers Jared and Simon Grace, along with their sister Mallory, find themselves pulled into an alternate world full of faeries and other creatures.
Director:
Mark Waters
Stars:
Freddie Highmore,
Mary-Louise Parker,
Sarah Bolger
The Cromwell clan split their time between the real world and "Halloweentown", but the son of an old rival threatens to make the latter "real" and the real world a place of monsters.
Director:
Mary Lambert
Stars:
Kimberly J. Brown,
Judith Hoag,
Daniel Kountz
A young girl discovers her father has an amazing talent to bring characters out of their books and must try to stop a freed villain from destroying them all, with the help of her father, her aunt, and a storybook's hero.
Director:
Iain Softley
Stars:
Brendan Fraser,
Sienna Guillory,
Eliza Bennett
On another planet in the distant past, a Gelfling embarks on a quest to find the missing shard of a magical crystal, and so restore order to his world.
Lucy and Edmund Pevensie return to Narnia with their cousin Eustace where they meet up with Prince Caspian for a trip across the sea aboard the royal ship The Dawn Treader. Along the way they encounter dragons, dwarves, merfolk, and a band of lost warriors before reaching the edge of the world.
In a parallel universe, young Lyra Belacqua journeys to the far North to save her best friend and other kidnapped children from terrible experiments by a mysterious organization.
Director:
Chris Weitz
Stars:
Nicole Kidman,
Daniel Craig,
Dakota Blue Richards
Marnie, Dylan, and Sophie Piper have their first out of many adventures! On Halloween, while Marnie is arguing with her mother Gwen, the kids' grandmother Aggie comes to visit. Aggie wants ... See full summary »
Director:
Duwayne Dunham
Stars:
Debbie Reynolds,
Judith Hoag,
Kimberly J. Brown
Alice follows a white rabbit down a rabbit-hole into a whimsical Wonderland, where she meets characters like the delightful Cheshire Cat, the clumsy White Knight, a rude caterpillar, and the hot-tempered Queen of Hearts and can grow ten feet tall or shrink to three inches. But will she ever be able to return home? Written by
Anonymous
Martin Short's head was digitally enlarged to three times its normal size, so to better replicate the Mad Hatter in Sir John Tenniel's illustrations. See more »
Goofs
When the Queen of Hearts decides to decapitate the cards who were painting the roses red, Alice hides them in her skirt to save them. However, they are never seen getting out, and no further reference is made to them in the film. See more »
Quotes
Mad Hatter:
[looking at his watch]
What day of the month is it?
Alice:
The fourth.
Mad Hatter:
AHA! Two days wrong!
[glares at the March Hare]
Mad Hatter:
I told you not to use butter!
March Hare:
It was the best butter...
The Dormouse:
Danish, mmm...
Mad Hatter:
Yes, but some crumbs must have got in as well. I said, don't put butter in the works with a breadknife...!
March Hare:
I couldn't put it in with a fork, could I? Here, let me see...
Mad Hatter:
I wouldn't think of it... but I will.
[...] See more »
I love the two Alice books and quite often I find myself looking through the pages, reading some of my favorite parts.
I think for a TV_version, this film works quite well, it is a treat to watch all those celebrities becoming some of the most famous characters in literature. Strangely though, my favorite sequence is the one with Peter Ustinov and Pete Postlethwaite as the Walrus and the Carpenter, probably the only scene in the movie that does not contain CGI.
So, why only six stars? As in most versions, the makers of the movie have mixed all kinds of elements from "Alice in Wonderland" with "Through the looking glass" (Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum, The Walrus and the Carpenter, The White Knight). It may work, if you really look at the books just as a collection of episodes, but whenever this is done, the makers miss the point of the books. Alice in "Through the looking glass" is quite different from Alice in "Alice in wonderland" and also, there is a completely different composition to the latter book which is explained in the preface and which finds no acknowledgment whatsoever here. I think the makers of this movie again don't understand the books at all and though I enjoy watching these scenes independently from each other, the whole leaves me unsatisfied.
I have gotten used to mixing the Alice stories, Walt Disney has done the same thing and others as well. But what bothers me most about this film it that it turns the whole thing into a story of initiation. Come on.... Alice does not dare to perform a song in front of her parent's guest but after walking through Wonderland she finally does? This is just plain wrong and completely in contrast to the meaning of the books. Why would you want do make sense out of nonsense? The books are meant to portray Victorian stereotypes, make fun of language etc, but not to enrich a child to become more independent and self-assured. Moreover, it does not make sense at all, why Alice should finally be able to sing in front of the others.
All in all, this movie has fine performances and puppets and decent (considering the time it was made and it being made for TV) CGI, is nice to look at but in the end only mediocre TV-entertainment.
16 of 22 people found this review helpful.
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I love the two Alice books and quite often I find myself looking through the pages, reading some of my favorite parts.
I think for a TV_version, this film works quite well, it is a treat to watch all those celebrities becoming some of the most famous characters in literature. Strangely though, my favorite sequence is the one with Peter Ustinov and Pete Postlethwaite as the Walrus and the Carpenter, probably the only scene in the movie that does not contain CGI.
So, why only six stars? As in most versions, the makers of the movie have mixed all kinds of elements from "Alice in Wonderland" with "Through the looking glass" (Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum, The Walrus and the Carpenter, The White Knight). It may work, if you really look at the books just as a collection of episodes, but whenever this is done, the makers miss the point of the books. Alice in "Through the looking glass" is quite different from Alice in "Alice in wonderland" and also, there is a completely different composition to the latter book which is explained in the preface and which finds no acknowledgment whatsoever here. I think the makers of this movie again don't understand the books at all and though I enjoy watching these scenes independently from each other, the whole leaves me unsatisfied.
I have gotten used to mixing the Alice stories, Walt Disney has done the same thing and others as well. But what bothers me most about this film it that it turns the whole thing into a story of initiation. Come on.... Alice does not dare to perform a song in front of her parent's guest but after walking through Wonderland she finally does? This is just plain wrong and completely in contrast to the meaning of the books. Why would you want do make sense out of nonsense? The books are meant to portray Victorian stereotypes, make fun of language etc, but not to enrich a child to become more independent and self-assured. Moreover, it does not make sense at all, why Alice should finally be able to sing in front of the others.
All in all, this movie has fine performances and puppets and decent (considering the time it was made and it being made for TV) CGI, is nice to look at but in the end only mediocre TV-entertainment.