Some spoilers ahead!

Alice in Wonderland is, in many ways, what everyone has come to expect from visionary director Tim Burton: it’s visually sumptuous – equal parts fantastic and macabre – and populated with eccentric, half-mad characters who would just as soon offer you tea as take your head off.

Tim Burton’s Alice isn’t a remake of the popular children’s stories by Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass), rather it is a reimagining. In Burton’s adaptation, a grown-up Alice is nearing twenty and having trouble adjusting to the expectations of aristocratic Victorian society, namely that she make a suitable marriage and leave the willful impulses of childhood behind. After being publicly surprised by an offer of engagement to a man she doesn’t care for, Alice flees into a garden in pursuit of a white rabbit only she can see.  The pursuit ends in a rabbit hole and a one-way ticket to Wonderland, the bizarre and topsy-turvy world of her childhood fantasies.

In Wonderland, Alice is met by a motley crew of creatures she has dreamed of before but has no recollection of ever meeting. The creatures inform her that Wonderland is falling into ruin under the despotic rule of the Red Queen and only a champion who can slay the Queen’s vicious pet Jabberwocky will restore Wonderland to the rule of the gentler (but affected) White Queen.  There is some debate as to whether this grownup Alice is THE Alice they remember for as she is aloof and solemn, having lost, as the Mad Hatter speculates, her “muchness”.

Unfortunately for the audience, even when in the heat of battle, actress Mia Wasikowska appears only mildy invested in the curious world around her.  She stoicaly moves from scene to scene, and even Johnny Depp’s earnest Hatter and Stephen Fry’s playful Cheshire Cat barely elicit a reaction.  As a heroine, Wasikowska’s Alice leaves muchness to be desired.

Many of Wonderland’s characters will be familiar to those who have seen Disney’s 1951 animated film, including the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, the Cheshire Cat, and Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.  Burton invents a quest for Alice to slay the Jabberwocky to make room for some of Carroll’s less famous characters (the White Queen, the Knave of Hearts, the Bandersnatch and the Jubjub Bird), but with only a flimsy plot tying the characters together, the movie is little more than a homage to Carroll’s greatest hits.  Even the film’s best lines – the playful musings and curious logic – are pulled straight from the books.

One of the few moments I felt truly invested in Alice’s quest to save Wonderland came at the end when she recites “six impossible things” she has come to believe to build up her courage.  It is the impossible that makes Lewis’s Wonderland so enchanting, and even a lackluster adaptation can’t take away from the allure of the imagined and the surreal.

Six impossible things Alice believes (before breakfast):

1. There’s a potion that can make you shrink.
2. And a cake that can make you grow.
3. Cats can disappear.
4. Animals can talk.
5. There’s a place called Wonderland.
6. I can slay the Jabberwockey!