So, the new Alice in Wonderland *spoilers*
It should have been better than it was, somehow, but it wasn't bad. I enjoyed it, but I feel like I should have liked it more than I did. I'm not quite sure what was missing.
The movie isn't an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, it's more of a return to Wonderland, or rather, apparently, Underland. Alice, a likably improper woman, flees an overblown proposal, partly because she feels trapped and partly because she keeps seeing a rabbit in a waistcoat and is curious and falls back into Underland. Once there, there is debate as to whether she is "the right Alice." The Dormouse thinks she isn't, the White Rabbit thinks she is, and she thinks she's dreaming.
In short, Alice is the destined hero, there to save Underland from the Red Queen and put her sister, the White Queen, who's...at least not collecting a moat full of heads. Granted, the White Queen has taken a vow not to harm any living creature, but she is darn determined to get Alice to slay the Jabberwocky. We can only hope that power won't make her as slaughter-happy as her big-headed sister.
I've never been terribly fond of the whole destined hero story, but I must say that this movie actually does it right (from my point of view) as well as being nice enough to give us a female destined hero. (While they turn up often enough in fantasy novels, there's a decided shortage of them (or, really, female heroes of any kind) in the movies.) You see, Alice isn't "the right Alice" when she enters Underland, she has to regain her "muchness" to be the one. In other words, Alice is the destined hero because of who she is, not what she is. This isn't Narnia, where any random human would do, or Harry Potter, where our hero is only important because he's a horcrux. No, Alice has to own who she is - speak her mind, act on her beliefs and her courage - to be "the right Alice." If more destined hero stories were like that, I'd like them a whole lot better.
I also liked that Alice retrieved the Vorpal Sword not by killing the Bandersnatch, as heroes generally do guardians of plot-vital-treasure, but by giving it its eye back, which won it over. I suppose no one had ever been nice to it before and that was why it not only let her have the sword, but came to her rescue and became her steed. It would have been nice to have a little more of an exchange between the two of them before it was won over...as well as having some idea of what, beyond it perhaps seeming like dream-logic, prompted Alice to give it back its eye.
There was something missing in some of the character and relationship development in the movie. There needed to be a little more...something...here and there for us to better follow people's motivations and growing importance to one another. There somehow wasn't quite enough emotional draw, somehow. Which is too bad, because the movie is really rather neat in other ways. It's not a bad movie, by any means, it just should have been better.