Hello nightmare fuel and thanks for ruining my night. Does anyone ever wonder why people worry so much about the content of movies these days when the stuff from decades earlier looks like a drug-induced nightmare that no one remembers filming? Seriously, most of the characters in this version of Alice in Wonderland look as though they could have come right from The Shining and been completely comfortable returning to the Overlook at the end of the day. One thing that’s pretty obvious if you pay close attention is that they did follow the original story very close much as Disney’s animated version did, though when all is said and done a lot of people appear to be content leaving out big chunks of the book and getting right to the idea of Alice being lost in Wonderland until she finds the Red Queen, whereupon things only get even more confusing and more dangerous. Personally I’ve always enjoyed the tea party scene, and there’s nothing that can take away the joy of the Cheshire, which wasn’t originally a huge part of the story but became such in the animated version and then the Tim Burton version that came after. Something about that cat has always been the most appealing part of the story while the rest has been a bumpy and lumpy ride through a maddened kingdom that has a mass of internal issues and a ruler that’s a little too decapitation-happy.
Really though the sedate feeling of the accompanying music is so out of whack with the frantic pace of the trailer that it’s hard to keep up while listening to the music and trying to figure out just what’s going on from one moment to the next. This is one of the many charms of the Alice in Wonderland story however, its sometimes hectic and hard to deal with pace, but at the same time it’s very appealing to those that can exist in a maddened state of mind since it makes perfect sense and offers up a plenitude of ideas that can veer off in so many directions one might think that the story itself is a mecca or a vast pool of creativity that was made to inspire others to follow their own path or one of the many meandering paths of Wonderland to an end that many might not even be able to guess at. There I go again, wandering and veering off. Ah well, as the Cheshire might say, “We’re all mad here…”
The madness inherent in this story is something that many people scoff at as they would gladly call it a child’s tale and nothing more since it does lack a lot of cohesion and appears to mask itself with the idea that the lunacy that makes up a good part of the story is a smokescreen that seeks to squirrel away the main point. Those that manage to follow the story from front to back and start to end will usually have a host of different reactions depending on their own personal bias and their ability to adapt to or reason away the madness that is represented by the notes within the spaces of the story. It sounds confusing but Alice in Wonderland is one of the many stories that offers a perfect excuse to lose oneself in the madness and just have fun with it since there’s such a jovial and playful feel to Wonderland that it’s hard not to just jump in and swim away or fly off into the distance and have an adventure of your own. But yeah, this trailer itself is beyond freaky since the makeup, the effects, and the characters all look as though they hopped, jumped, and sidled their way out of a nightmare that wasn’t fully formed or baked yet. Again though, that’s all a part of it since this is one of the stories that throughout history has taken on one form or another considering whose handling it and has been more or less the same no matter the appearance it’s taken on. Some stories take on a very different feel and even meaning when they’re changed up, but Alice in Wonderland has been an excursion into madness for so long that trying to change it is like trying to rearrange a bucket of water, at some point you realize it’s just the same, fluid form that it’s always going to be and it takes something incredibly drastic to change it’s appearance. David Robson of BBC has an interesting take on the story and what it means.
Doing such a thing would be entirely possible but without ruining the story it would take some skill and some very daring individual that believed that they could piece it all back together in a manner that might preserve the same feel that it’s had for so long. Now that would be a sight and a half, though whether it’d be worth it is something else.
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