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Alice on SyFy, Alice in Wonderland Mini Series Review

Alice on SyFy..A Review

By June Williams On December 7, 2009 In Reviews: Television 6 Comments

Alice on SyFy
A Review
By June K. Williams

 

Whether your first Alice was a Disney movie or the original book by Reverend Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll, there is a good chance you were enchanted by the tales as a child. There seems to have been nearly as many retellings of her adventures in Wonderland as those of Romeo and Juliet. The challenge is to make the story relevant and accessible to the audience be it for people of the early 21st century or colonists circling a distant star a thousand years from now. Certain elements must be constant. A journey from the mundane world by a girl with a young impressionable mind to a place populated with strange people and creatures whose actions and motives are a mystery. Whatever interior logic exists in this place is inaccessible to Alice. She is trying to solve a puzzle with missing pieces and the puzzle keeps rearranging itself as she tries to fit them together. She, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, is looking to return home.


I am happy to say the SyFy channel’s take is better than I expected. In fact it is so good that I hope Tim Burton’s Alice which is supposed to premier March ’10 will be nearly as good. This SyFy version may not be quite as dark as what Tim Burton has planned but the sets are realistically unreal. In this production we have a city that is vertical with sidewalks more like catwalks hugging the sides of buildings and buses that act like elevators transporting you between levels. There is a casino built of playing cards. All about the city vines seem to follow their way into interiors from outside without any real boundaries. This is a highly political Wonderland, complete with tyrannical rule, a resistance that has been barely hanging on, and others who simply want to survive. The method of keeping the populace under control is a very advanced form of bread and circuses. It is managed by draining people from “our” world and using the distillation of their emotions as a kind of currency in Wonderland. The goal is to give people instant gratification and in doing so can rob them of the will to act for themselves.

The players (other than Alice and her mother) are all a bit or more than a bit off center. It has plenty of eerie moments but it is lucid enough to allow for exciting action and the pace never flags from the time we first see Alice in action in our world.

Alice is played by 28 year old Canadian actress Caterina Scorsone. I’ve never seen her perform before although she has been acting since she was 8 years old. My instincts tell me she is about to be “discovered” after many long years of work.


This Alice arrives in wonderland 150 years after her namesake and things have changed. How she got there was different than the original. After all she is a young woman not a little girl. We first see her in action as a martial arts instructor. There is little doubt that she is a strong and independent young woman. But she is also haunted by her father’s disappearance when she was just 10 years old. It has made her leery of getting too involved with a man. She does bring a guy she cares about home to meet her mother. Then she rejects him when he tries to move the relationship too far too fast. In short order she is in pursuit of the boyfriend she had just rejected as he is mugged and kidnapped by persons unknown to her. Then it is through the Looking Glass for Alice. She quickly discerns Wonderland is dangerous and the rules by which it operates are twisted and arbitrary. As moments from her past illuminate the situation she now finds herself in, the audience is pulled along down deeper and we are going to find out how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Andrew Lee Potts takes on the role of the Hatter with apparent ease and style. The Hatter is an interesting mixture of apparent con artist and warm hearted freedom fighter. Not everyone is meant to man the battlements in war. Some must supply the troops with food and medicine. The Hatter is a wiseguy and a survivor but he is not heartless and he is not a coward either.

Kathy Bates makes a believable Queen of Hearts. She telegraphs the maniacal control freak personality so well that you hardly need dialogue to understand where the character is coming from. It is very easy to think of the Queen as able to order a beheading without giving it a second thought and that her minions will unquestioningly do her bidding. She is as intelligent as she is ruthless and of all the dangers in Wonderland she is the most fearsome.

Tim Curry as DoDo, the resistance leader is convincing, but perhaps it is my expectation of him outshining every actor around him that left me slightly disappointed. See what happens when you are consistently the best? People like me start to quibble with a good performance because we feel you must always put in a great performance.

All in all the cast is better than one would expect to run across in a SyFy channel mini series. If you haven’t seen it yet then by all means do so. One thing about Skiffy (as many people have nicknamed the network) is that they repeat a mini series very frequently in the week it premiers and then occasionally for the next year so you still have the chance to see it.

By June K. Williams

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June Williams

June Williams

June, also known affectionately as Buzzy Lady #2, has been with the company since it began. She was born in Manhattan, raised in the Bronx (the first 12 years in the heart of the south Bronx) and spent most of her adult life living in Westchester County N.Y.

Always a Science Fiction fan and dabbler in writing she had thought herself too practical to pursue a career in the field. Before coming to Buzzy she spent over 30 years in the travel industry, then one day decided it was time to spread her wings and plunge into publishing. Everyone she knew thought she had gone slightly daft but as this was not the first time they had expressed that opinion she took the red pill anyway and now spends all of her time putting together projects that make each day a pleasure.

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  • Lomax

    farzzle fracken garp’en brack!

    I intentionally did not watch it because AMC’s “The Prisoner” was so bad I had just assumed that Sy Fy’s “Alice” was going to blow chunks because it came on a Sunday night, as opposed to Saturday, AND let’s face it- Sy Fy. Plus what could I compare it to? Their “Wizard of Oz” take, “Tin Man,” was not all that good, I just figured that “Alice” was going to be at best watchable and I could skip it.

    Is there any way you can get the show BEFORE it airs and tell us before I miss it weather or not its worth the time it takes to watch it?

  • June K. Williams

    Hi Lomax-I’m looking into a way of getting to see these things a bit early so that in the future you will indeed have an early warning system to alert you to the treasures and the trash

  • Demelza Cooper

    I saw it the second time around and not only do I think it was good, I think it is the best thing I’ve senn on the Sci Fi channel since Farscape

  • Irving Belfi

    It was to hope a total reinvention of Wonderland, with the twist that Burton gives to his films, but sadly, this version on LSD of “Alice in Wonderland” is not much than that, because where previous Burton films shined, this one failed. There’s not a chance in getting involved with the characters (as we did with both sweet Eddies - Scissorhands and Wood -), and the adventure they are living is as plain as a 32′ LED TV.

  • TFerris

    Best Syfy production since “Farscape”-exactely! I loved how making Alice a martial arts instructor gave her both the confidence to confront all the strangeness of Wonderland and at the same time represented her vulnerability of distrust. She has created emotional defenses to protect herself from abandonment. It was absolutely charming to watch how the Hatter helps her work through her trust issues-she can rely on him to keep coming back. He may be self-serving at times but he is honest about it, and she recognizes him as a man of integrity that doesn’t skip out on his people/family when things get tough. The Hatter points out her destructive behavior by chasing after the men who have abondoned her thus giving her closure. And that’s just one layer of the exciting story that gives the “Alice in Wonderland” tale a fresh take. The whole cast was amazing, but Andrew-Lee Potts-WOW! and Welcome to America!

  • http://www.tv-video.us/ alice in wonderland white

    It’s a damn shame then that this meticulously crafted, psychedelic visual-journey isn’t matched with a screenplay that was given just as much effort. The inbuilt metaphors of the Alice tale are still there however writer Linda Woolverton adds very little in the way of character development or plot undercurrents, seemingly intent on relying on the visual effects wizards and actors to contribute the extra layers. Her biggest missed opportunity is further exploration into the Mad Hatter or even the White Queen – both of whom are half-baked caricatures – with the Hatter coming off as a mere chance for Depp to be quirky, rather than the cleverly-written character with an interesting back story that he should have been. To Woolverton’s credit though, she did manage to concoct some deliriously amusing dialogue for the Hatter and the Red Queen; a small highlight of her script which partially redeems her lack-lustre attempts elsewhere.