‘Alice in Wonderland’

Curiouser and curiouser. I wonder what happened to Wonderland?

Scratch that. I know what happened to Wonderland.

Director Tim Burton happened.

And so did a recent, distressing cinematic trend -- in which movies based on beloved literary classics seem determined to trash the things that made the originals so beloved in the first place.

All the wonder, all the whimsy that's made Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" a demented delight since 1865 has gone down the rabbit hole in director Burton's visually vivid, thematically vapid new version.

It's demented, all right. But delightful? Not quite.

Especially not if you know and love Carroll's original (and its companion volume, "Through the Looking Glass"), with its nonsensical, crazy-mirror view of even more nonsensical Victorian mores.

This time around, it's almost as if Alice took a wrong turn and wound up in Narnia. (Or maybe on the Yellow Brick Road, bound for Oz.)

You see, this Alice ("In Treatment's" Mia Wasikowska) has a quest, along with a clunky back story -- in which she's the nightmare-plagued daughter of a visionary businessman who reassuringly replies, when little Alice asks if she's mad, "All the best people are."

Flash forward 13 years. Alice, now 19, is about to be married off to a persnickety nobleman's son.

No wonder she'd rather chase a nattily dressed white rabbit and tumble after him down that magical passage to Wonderland. Or, as its inhabitants prefer to call it, Underland.

It seems Alice has been there before -- and perhaps not only in her dreams.

A seerlike, smoke-enveloped caterpillar named Absalom (Alan Rickman provides his plummy, know-it-all voice) informs Alice that she might, or might not be, the Alice who's destined to slay the fearsome Jabberwock on the fateful Frabjous Day.

Lewis Carroll's Alice would confess to the Caterpillar, "at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then."

Alas, it's not Lewis Carroll's Alice. Which means the White Rabbit (voiced by Michael Sheen), the feisty Dormouse (Barbara Windsor), roly-poly twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee (Matt Lucas) and the ethereally cheerful Cheshire Cat (a sly Stephen Fry) escort Alice to a jolly tea party hosted by the Mad Hatter (who else but Johnny Depp?).

He may be mad as a hatter, but he knows the real Alice when he sees her -- and manages to get his head together enough to get Alice to the court of the strident, swell-headed Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), whose favorite phrase is "Off with his head!" (Or her head, the queen being an equal-opportunity despot.)

Along the way, Alice encounters other strange Wonderland denizens, from the frumious, sharp-toothed Bandersnatch to the Red Queen's sniveling partner in crime, the Knave of Hearts (Crispin Glover). And let's not forget the queen's radiantly saintly sister, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), who's as virtuous as her sibling is vile.

But don't expect to see such Wonderland/Looking Glass fixtures as Humpty Dumpty, the White Knight, the Duchess or the Mock Turtle, as this "Alice" slogs to its inevitable conclusion: the computer-generated battle between Alice, decked out in armor worthy of Joan of Arc, and the monstrous Jabberwock.

Considering Burton's triumphant 2007 adaptation of composer Stephen Sondheim's Broadway classic "Sweeney Todd," we might have expected the director to be a bit more faithful to "Alice in Wonderland's" source material. (Or maybe not; remember what Burton did to Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"?)

He and screenwriter Linda Woolverton ("Beauty and the Beast," "The Lion King") give Alice the plucky, girl-power determination of a fairy tale heroine, but they never link her Underland quest to her life above ground. Or acknowledge the tension between Alice's impending adulthood and her childhood dreamworld.

At least that would have provided something to ponder during (and in between) "Alice's" computer-generated mayhem, but director Burton's too busy conjuring his nightmare-tinged visions of Underland/Wonderland to bother with anything else.

Occasionally, there's no need to. Especially when Bonham Carter (Burton's off-screen significant other) throws yet another hilariously unhinged hissy fit, or Hathaway starts swanning around like a beauty queen rather than a royal one.

Depp (in his seventh movie with Burton) looks every inch the madcap Hatter, from his carrot-top fright wig to his whirligig green eyes. But it's an outside-in performance, with the emphasis on the Hatter's oddball surface rather than his inner lunacy. Yet there are times when Depp manages to recall "Wizard of Oz's" lovable Scarecrow -- especially when he dances.

Wasikowska's Alice approaches her journey with determined forthrightness -- and an equanimity that assures us she's wandered through this Wonderland before.

Which must be why she reacts to every bizarre occurrence with such unshakable aplomb.

Perhaps if she seemed just a bit more amazed by it all, we might be, too.

As it is, I can hear Alice (the real one), saying, "I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir, because I'm not myself, you see."

We do see, Alice -- and, more's the pity, you're definitely not yourself these days.

Contact movie critic Carol Cling at ccling@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0272.