Last night the husband and I saw Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland in 3-D. Wow! It was awesome! It was the first time I’ve ever seen a movie in 3-D. I want to see more! I had always assumed that 3-D movies were like a giant, moving View Master and, in fact, it was like that but it was also more. You read that in 3-D movies objects appear to “fly right off the screen” but you don’t really get it until you see it. Some objects do appear to come out of the screen and float above the seats in front of you and the effect looks amazingly real.
It’s not perfect, of course. There’s quite a bit of motion blur in the faster moving objects and sometimes things just look wrong somehow but I love 3-D and I can hardly wait to see more. Now I’m very disappointed that I didn’t see Avatar in 3-D.
Aside from the 3-D, Alice in Wonderland was a fun and charmingly weird movie. I’ve never been very interested in the original story. I’ve never read it and I can’t remember if I’ve ever seen a movie or TV version of it. I think I must have at some time when I was very young. It seems like I know almost the whole story but for some reason nothing about it has ever appealed to me very much. It took Tim Burton to get me interested at all and even then I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted to see this movie. It was “Oooo! Cool – a new Tim Burton movie!” vs. “Oh. Alice in Wonderland. Meh.”
But it almost seems like Alice in Wonderland and Tim Burton were made for each other. Who else could take such silly characters and make them work? In this movie Alice is all grown up and runs away from her engagement party and the dull, stuffy young man that everyone expects her to marry, and falls down the rabbit hole, again. There she meets up with all the familiar characters: The Mad Hatter, (Johnny Depp) the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Red Queen and the White Queen and others and they have silly, gross and slightly scary adventures.
I probably would have enjoyed it in regular, flat 2-D but it was the 3-D that really made it worth the price of a movie ticket.
