Alice (2009)

  This is a two-part miniseries that originally aired on SyFy.  It's not very good.  Kathy Bates won an Emmy for it anyway.

I'm not going to be mad at it for being yet another Alice in Wonderland interpretation.  There's enough weird crap in that book that almost any kind of property can be made from it and still be interesting.  I didn't like it because I thought it came off as boring.  I didn't find the main actress to be engaging in any way and I certainly didn't buy her as a heroine.  I'll show you:

Alice (Caterina Scorsone) is a woman with daddy issues.  Her father disappeared out of the blue ten years ago and she's never really gotten past it.  She's dating a hot guy named Jack (Philip Winchester) but freaks out when he gives her a ring.  She throws him out, then goes running after him to give the ring back only to watch him being kidnapped.  She follows the kidnappers through a mirror and into Wonderland, where humans (called "oysters") are rounded up and forced to play in the Queen of Hearts' casino.  Their positive emotions are sucked out of them and distilled into liquids for the Wonderlandians to drink.  The Queen (Kathy Bates) and her Suits rule the land with an iron grip.  Alice ends up running around with the Hatter (Andrew Lee Potts) to try and find Jack.

Seems like a decent take on the story, right?  Here's the kicker and a big fat **Spoiler Alert**:

Jack is the Queen's son and a secret agent of the Resistance.  He gave Alice the ring in order to bring her to Wonderland so she could get her father, who has been brainwashed and is actually the one in charge of draining the life force out of all the oysters.  She manages to get through to him right before he gets killed (closure!) and then defeats the evil queen.  After all the crap she goes through, she decides that she just can't trust Jack and goes back to her world.  The Hatter follows almost immediately and she makes out with him.

**End Spoilers**  Even that sounds pretty innocuous, right?  But as part of her overall pattern, it's troubling.  This woman makes absolutely no emotional progress.  Her mother mentions early on in the movie that she runs from relationships, she runs all through the movie to and then from relationships, and at the end she is still running from any sort of commitment.  Alice is a guaranteed spinster and she has no one to blame but herself.

The special effects aren't terrible and all the scenery and costumes are pretty but the story is flat and there are much better adaptations out there.