[narcolepticsloth]

I hated the plot of this movie. It made me wish that Burton would give up on cgi and go back to live action stuff since he is clearly more comfortable in that area.
Also this is by far one of Danny Elfman's worst scores to date. it sounded as if he took all the left over songs from Charlie and the chocolate factory, mashed them together, and repeated it over and over again without taking in consideration what was happening onscreen.
I agree with Gix about the ending. it was pretty weak.
But on the other hand the characters were really well done, with the exception of Mia who was kinda dull.
I think that people expected the movie to stay close to the book because of Burton's treatment of Charlie and the chocolate factory, which was a brilliant movie, and way better than the original mostly because it didnt stray too far from the book. (interesting bit of trivia: Roald Dahl gave Burton's version his approval and completely loathed the Gene Wilder version.)
the movie was titled "Alice in Wonderland" which one could safely assume that it is close to the book. If it were titled "Alice fights the Jabberwocky in Underland" then I'm sure the reviews you mention wouldnt have much of a problem with how far it strayed.

I think Burton should have stretched it to 2 hours so he could give some of the better characters more screen time and figure out a decent plot that actually had a decent resolution. Why didnt he just use the plots from the books? One would think that Tim Burton of all people would "get" the nonsensicalness of the stories and would be able to work in that setting and with that story comfortably.
Overall it was a bit of a letdown...
My favorite version of Alice in wonderland has to be the 1999 tv movie, simply because it has Ben Kingsley as the Caterpillar, Robbie Coltraine (aka Hagrid) as Tweedledum, Gene Wilder as the Mock Turtle, and Martin Short as the Mad hatter (who looks remarkably like the hatter already). I think it captured the essence of the books better than any other version I've seen, including the disney cartoon..