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It was a brillig day in Underland, the borogobes being mimsy and all. But Alice was in no position to either gyre or gimble.
It had, after all, been a trying day already. Mere moments before, a supercilious lord asked for her hand in marriage—a wonderful compliment, to be sure. But Alice doesn't love the man (who has a cantankerous digestive system besides). And then there was the well-dressed white rabbit to consider, scurrying through the gardens and brandishing a charming pocket watch.
Naturally, Alice did what any normal 19-year-old girl would do under similar circumstances: She left her hopeful suitor to chase the white rabbit and—again, quite naturally—fell down a rabbit hole.
The hole leads to Underland—a place where certain drinks will shrink you, certain foods will sprout you, certain cats disappear without warning and certain queens will, if they have their way, lop off your head(s). It's the sort of place that takes some getting used to. So weird, so wild, so positively frumious is this place that Alice assumes it must be a dream. Why dwell on the gyres and gimbles when, after all, a quite-normal English breakfast is just around the corner? Why take this world seriously at all?
So as Alice nibbles on cakes to grow and sips vials to shrink, the nervous residents of Underland watch and wonder whether they lured the right Alice down the hole.
Underland, you see, is anxious for Alice (who visited before, as documented in Lewis Carroll's classic children's books) to fulfill her destiny. A magical scroll clearly shows Alice (some Alice, if not this one) doing battle with the fearsome Jabberwocky, a terrible creature controlled by the Red Queen—a monarch who never outgrew her "terrible twos" and rules the land accordingly.
Conclusion
Teaming up on their seventh movie, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp have not merely created a reinterpretation of Lewis Carroll's classic Alice in Wonderland or its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. This CGI-stocked live-action flick is actually another sequel—a tale that takes place a decade or so after the childlike Alice first found her way into Underland.
That conceit freed Burton (the man behind such gloomy and sometimes gruesome works as Sweeney Todd, Corpse Bride and Sleepy Hollow) to remake the land and remold the characters to suit his own taste. As such, his Wonderland is a darker country and more perilous—both for Alice and the moviegoer. I know children who would have Bandersnatch nightmares for months if they were allowed to see it. So age-based caution should be exercised before plunging the whole family down this particular rabbit hole.
But there's a dawn lurking behind this darkness. Because while Burton's Wonderland is a far different, far more dangerous place than Carroll imagined, it also requires that Alice be a bit more than the levelheaded innocent Carroll wrote about. Burton's Alice is, flat-out, a hero. Her heroism isn't determined so much by virtue of great intelligence or ability, but her willingness to persevere in the midst of trials, her courage to make sacrifices for others and, finally, her submission to destiny (while still displaying a great deal of free will, too).
In the end, Alice is given an opportunity to stay in Underland—to escape all the problems of the real world by retreating to the comforting nonsense of the rabbit hole.
It's a tempting offer. Who doesn't sometimes long to escape reality through some sort of self-constructed fantasy? Alice, though, rejects the invite, telling Underlanders (or is it Underlandians?) that there are "questions I have to answer, things I have to do." In fighting the Jabberwocky, Alice also finds the courage to face up to more mundane challenges—to turn down her ill-suited suitor, for instance, and take on the challenge of a career.
Alice does indeed find her "muchness," and in doing so encourages us to find ours.
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