Alice in Wonderland / At this point in his adaptations, it’s pretty much a given Tim Burton doesn’t give a goth-hoot about the main character. It’s the Headless Horseman who tickles his claymation brain matter, not Ichabod Crane; Willy Wonka who sweetens his dark, shadowy cavities, not Charlie. And so, predictably, with Alice in Wonderland, the little girl who falls down the rabbit hole is nowhere near as compelling as the White Rabbit, or the Cheshire Cat.

By now we’ve sat through uku-billion incarnations of the Lewis Carroll children’s tale. Before she falls down the fateful hole though, Burton’s Alice is under filial pressure to marry a total dweeb. We know this because he’s stuck up, plus he inspects his boogers after he blows his nose in his hankie. (It’s a Disney production.)

Rather than give an answer to his proposal in front of their respective families, Alice chases after a white rabbit into the garden maze, and we know the rest. Burton’s interpretation of Wonderland is just as imaginatively colorful and creature-filled as James Cameron’s fawned-over Pandora. (And it’s also in uninspired 3-D.) Bright flowers have talking human faces and miniature rocking horses fly through the air like insects. It’s also a bit more gruesome: tongues are cut out, eyeballs plucked and in one casually nightmarish sequence, Alice crosses a moat by stepping on decapitated heads.

Where Burton really deviates is his need to turn Wonderland into a battleground worthy of a Tolkien epic. Especially after recent comic book and Syfy Channel interpretations, the idea isn’t all that innovative, but it’s definitely rousing as armored armies of red playing-cards clash spears with knights with chess headpieces on a giant black-and-white checkerboard. There’s even a nicely fearsome Jabberwocky rendered in a pleasing retro stop-motion style. Yet as exciting as it is, one can’t help but feel the rampaging doesn’t fit with the source material.

Alice is played by Mia Wasikowska (so good as the abused young gymnast in In Treatment), and as stated earlier, she is the most uninteresting character in the movie. Until she dons armor at the end to battle the dragon, we forget we’re supposed to be rooting for her. It isn’t her fault: When you can hold your own one-on-one against Gabriel Byrne for an entire season of a TV series that takes place solely on a therapist’s couch, you’re an amazing actress. Her director failed her and Burton allows Wasikowska to be swallowed by his green-screen imagery.

For the first time, Burton’s muse Johnny Depp feels like he’s been shoe-horned into the screenplay. It’s as if the writer purposefully looked for more open space in the script to make room for the Mad Hatter, and Depp’s costumed shtick becomes more routinely ordinary than gloriously weird. Although he seems perfectly happy in an orange wig and pale-face make-up, the only new thing Depp brings to the tea party is the faint hint of a Scottish accent.

Even a surprisingly threatening Crispin Glover barely registers amid the FX. Only the delightfully bizarre Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen manages to rise above the chaos, her face superimposed on a giant noggin of a head. She screams, “Off with their heads!” with relished gusto while maintaining just the right tone for extolling the virtues of using a warm pig for one’s tired feet. Also terrific is Anne Hathaway as the White Queen, exaggeratedly sashaying her way through every scene.

Of course, most memorable are the non-humans: Alan Rickman’s droll voice as the smoking caterpillar and Michael Sheen’s as the stammering White Rabbit. Best of all is Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat. He purrs his lines with aplomb while his computer avatar floats through the air, lackadaisically rolling upside down before evaporating and reappearing with just that toothy grin. In one scene, the cat sips a tea cup with his chin propped on a lazy paw, and heck, it’s like the feline’s more stoned than the caterpillar. Too bad the rest of the movie didn’t take more hits off the hookah because a scant few of these special effects are all we’re really curiouser about in Alice in Wonderland.

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