MOVIE REVIEW 'Alice in Wonderland' FULL VIDEO

 One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small, and the pills Tim Burton gives you don't do very much at all.

With apologies to Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," that more or less sums up "Alice in Wonderland," the director's middling new version of the Lewis Carroll tale. It has its successful moments but it's surprisingly inert overall, more like a Burton derivative than something he actually did himself.

Through no fault of its own, "Alice" also has the misfortune of being the first major 3-D release to come out after the "Avatar" revolution, and when you add in that Burton chose to shoot in 2-D and have the footage converted, it inevitably plays like one of the last gasps of the old-fashioned ways of doing things.

Especially old-school is the framing device devised by veteran Disney animation screenwriter Linda Woolverton ("Beauty and the Beast," "The Lion King"). In this version, Alice is introduced as a 6-year-old girl troubled by visions of falling down a hole and "seeing all these creatures," episodes her kindly dad assures her are nothing but dreams.

Then it's 13 years later and Alice is a pouty young woman (Australian actress Mia Wasikowska) headed for a posh garden party with her mother. Alice is a bit of a rebel (she doesn't wear a corset!) and though she doesn't know it, she's on the way to what her family hopes will be her engagement party.

But once we meet Alice's intended, a complete twit named Hamish, we know that marriage is not going to happen, and a good thing too, for this part of the film is so tedious we are all but begging for the escape the rabbit hole provides, especially because it serves as a portal to Burton's inventive mind.

Alice is soon desperate to flee as well and, following the traditional white rabbit (voiced by Michael Sheen), she hurtles down the hole and confronts a world of wonders where animals talk and even flowers speak their minds.

Given the strength of Burton's imagination, it's not surprising that many of these creatures are engaging, especially if, like that rabbit, they are voiced by top British actors.

The unsettling Cheshire Cat ( Stephen Fry) is hard to forget, as are Absolem the Blue Caterpillar ( Alan Rickman), Bayard the Bloodhound (Timothy Spall) and fright legend Christopher Lee as the dread Jabberwocky.

Rather less satisfying is the script's notion that the creatures spend much of their time bickering as to whether this Alice is the same person who came down the rabbit hole a decade earlier and, if she is, whether she has "lost her muchness" in the intervening years. They even give her a hard time for getting the name of the location wrong: It's Underland, she's disdainfully told, not Wonderland.

These disputes soon become tiresome, even if one of Alice's champions is played by Johnny Depp. His Mad Hatter is a genuine fashionista whom we get to see designing wacky headgear like there is no tomorrow. There's no denying Depp's gifts and abilities, but this performance feels both indulgent and something we've all seen before.

What is even more unfortunate is the film's attempt to turn itself into an Underland version of "The Lord of the Rings," complete with massed forces of good and evil inevitably headed toward a sadly generic CGI battle to end all battles.

Inspiring the powers of light is the White Queen ( Anne Hathaway), while heading the wicked side is her sister, the dyspeptic Red Queen ( Helena Bonham Carter) and Stayne, the Knave of Hearts ( Crispin Glover), her 7-foot-6 top general.

All these people are in a lather about Alice because it turns out that a venerable document called the Oraculum has foretold that Alice will return to lead the forces of light and slay the dark side's champion, the mighty Jabberwocky.

Alice, of course, insists she is the nonviolent sort and likely to do no such thing but, frankly, what does she know?

With those battle scenes in place to please the boys, Burton and company have taken special care to provide pictures of Alice as a warrior princess in full Joan of Arc armor as a female empowerment icon for the girls in the audience.

While that kind of thing is always in short supply, it would be nicer if that image -- and the movie as a whole -- felt less like corporate moves and more like situations that came from the heart.

TV Review: Alice (2009)

The channel formerly known as SciFi and now known as Syfy is delivering their latest miniseries this week. Entitled Alice, the four-hour adventure is something of a re-imagining of Lewis Carroll's classic Wonderland tales. Both fun and distinctly odd at times, the Halmi-produced event is a reminder of just how much the television landscape has changed over the course of the past decade. Ten years ago this sort of big budget, beautifully produced, all-star event would have aired on a major network during a ratings sweep. Now, it will air on the NBC-Universal owned and ever more and more popular Syfy.

Written and directed by Nick Willing (he also directed SciFi's Tin Man in 2007), this version of Alice stars Caterina Scorsone in the lead role. Alice is no longer a young girl in England, but rather a 20-something karate instructor in the States. Following her kidnapped boyfriend, Jack Chase (Philip Winchester), the story rapidly finds Alice herself falling through a mirror (or, looking-glass, if you will) and into Wonderland.

Still ruled by the evil Queen of Hearts (Kathy Bates), Alice finds herself learning all about this odd land which the Queen rules by bottling the emotions of "Oysters," which is their term for people from our world. The Queen's evil Suits led by the White Rabbit (Allan Gray) have been kidnapping humans for years and Alice rapidly finds herself on the wrong side of the law.

Through the course of her misadventures, our Alice meets up with the Hatter (Andrew-Lee Potts), White Knight (Matt Frewer), a resistance leader named Dodo (Tim Curry), Doctors Dee and Dum (Eugene Lipinski), Caterpillar (Harry Dean Stanton), Carpenter (Timothy Webber), and the King of Hearts (Colm Meaney) among others. Or, in other words, people at least similarly named to those who figure in Lewis Carroll's tales.

The story Willing has constructed here is an interesting one, and it is certainly well conceived, but its relationship to the Carroll stories is not always an easy one. In this Wonderland there is certainly the story of another Alice, a legendary Alice, but what exactly this Alice did is unclear. It would seem impossible – or highly improbable – that the Alice of legend had the sort of interactions in Wonderland that Carroll wrote of, particularly as a version of all those characters is present here.

Scorsone is good as Alice, making the famous role (or a version of it) hers. She makes the absurd seem believable and serves as the perfect fish-out-of-water to function as a proxy for the equally confused and unaware audience. The true standouts here are Potts and Frewer, both of whom are exceptionally funny and charismatic. The rest of the cast, while obviously quite capable, are never really given as much of a chance to shine as they deserve. There are so many characters presented, and they are all somewhat different than our previous understanding of them that it may have behooved Syfy to give the miniseries a third installment just so that we could get the opportunity to get a better feel for the characters and this new Wonderland.

That is not to say that Alice's tale is not completed by the end of the miniseries, it most certainly is, but there are so many other tales present here, so many other things that Willing has conceived of, that it seems a shame that the audience doesn't get more.

Perhaps though the most unfortunate part of the tale is that of Alice's father. As this story goes, Alice's father disappeared many years before. Once the audience is made aware that the inhabitants of Wonderland kidnap humans, it becomes all too obvious that Alice's dad is among the kidnapped. Oddly, it takes Alice significantly longer than the audience to work out that her father is in Wonderland. In a story which otherwise works, and with a character who otherwise seems intelligent, the tale of the father seems unnecessarily tacked on and it feels as though Alice has a rather large blind spot.

Pitfalls aside, there is certainly more good than bad to this Alice. Willing has conceived of and constructed a new and interesting take on a beloved classic. He is blessed with a strong cast and if one of the biggest complaints of the miniseries is that one is left wanting more tales about the characters who inhabit this version of the story then he has clearly been very successful. Maybe one day he will even get the opportunity to revisit his Wonderland and provide us more tales from within his looking-glass.

Alice airs December 6 and 7 at 9pm on Syfy.