Tim Burton tampers with the children's classic to his cost in this lifeless reimagining of Lewis Carroll's book
Helena Bonham Carter as the 'ugly, oppressive' Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland
Helena Bonham Carter as the 'ugly, oppressive' Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland.

Tim Burton is in love with the Victorian age. His childhood idol was Vincent Price, who started out playing Prince Albert on stage, specialised in Victorian morbidity and made one of his final screen appearances in Burton's Edward Scissorhands. Burton's last film, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, was a bracing excursion into Victorian melodrama, and it was inevitable that his interest in mythology and the adolescent imagination would eventually attract him to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Appropriately his London office was once the home of Arthur Rackham, who succeeded Sir John Tenniel as Alice's illustrator.

The characters, language, puzzles and predicaments of Carroll's 1865 novel and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, became and remain part of the texture of our lives, as embedded as ancient mythology and more endearing. From the start, they've attracted movie-makers. As early as 1903 there was a nine-minute version of Alice, now available on the same BFI DVD as Jonathan Miller's brilliant 1966 TV film, inspired by Victorian monochrome photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron and Roger Fenton, and essentially a meditation on the panoply, psychopathology and social politics of high Victorian life. Despite the presence of Peter Sellers, Miller's movie isn't very funny, and to appreciate it you need to know the book well.

Almost as good is Gavin Millar's Dreamchild (1985), scripted by Dennis Potter, in which the elderly Alice Liddell (played by Coral Browne) recalls her life and the genesis of Alice during a 1932 visit to New York. A number of other films draw or comment on Alice with various degrees of obliquity – the Wachowskis's Matrix trilogy, Jacques Rivette's Céline and Julie Go Boating, Woody Allen's Alice and Neil Jordan's Ondine (reviewed below), in which a bright child meets a woman from another world with the comment, "curiouser and curiouser".

Mainstream films aimed at family audiences have cleaved closely to Carroll's text, conflating the two novels, sidestepping complexity of the sort dealt with in Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice and taking advantage of the wide range of eccentric, much-loved characters to use all-star casts. The 1933 Hollywood treatment, scripted by the super-literate Joseph L Mankiewicz and the great designer William Cameron Menzies, employed Paramount's roster of actors from WC Fields (Humpty Dumpty) to Cary Grant (Mock Turtle) and drew on Tenniel for its designs. In the 1940s Walt Disney hired Aldous Huxley to adapt the books. But Huxley was fired when he spoke out in favour of a Hollywood strike in which his 23-year-old son was beaten up by anti-union thugs hired by Disney and his allies. As a result, Disney turned to studio hacks for his slick, Americanised, extremely popular 1951 animated musical. The Disney picture resulted in the failure of a contemporaneous Anglo-French version featuring the British actress Carol March and puppets. Apart from some drug-related versions, the next interpretation was the highly theatrical British movie, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, told by Michael Jayston as Lewis Carroll, with an astonishing cast including Peter Sellers as the March Hare, but rather let down by indifferent songs and limp choreography.

Now Disney returns to the fray, with Burton directing a script by American children's writer Linda Woolverton, whose previous work for Disney on The Lion King, Mulan and the stage version of Beauty and the Beast is redolent of fashionable rites of passage and female empowerment. It's a mixture of live-action characters and computer-generated images, played or voiced by well-known (mostly British) actors, though the only one that could be deemed a major international star is Burton's frequent collaborator Johnny Depp as the maddest of Hatters. His red hair indicates the mercury poisoning that was the hat-maker's occupational disease, and he occasionally draws on the Scottish accent he developed to play JM Barrie in Finding Neverland.

The mediocre script draws in cavalier fashion on both Wonderland and Looking Glass, and uses a different framing story from the familiar one of Charles Dodgson and the Reverend Duckworth taking three young girls rowing. Alice is now the rebellious daughter of the imperial entrepreneur Charles Kingsleigh (presumably a reference to the author of The Water Babies, Charles Kingsley). The weird dreams she had as a child recur 13 years later when, after her father's death, she's about to be married off to the chinless son of Lord Ascot. Fleeing from a grand engagement party at a country mansion, she follows a white rabbit down a gigantic hole. This leads to a nightmarish forest, part King Kong's Skull Island, part James Cameron's Pandora, dominated by the menacing many-toothed Bandersnatch. The unimpressive 3D used throughout would have been better employed for the Underland scenes alone.

This curiously flat film is never particularly funny and rarely demonstrates Burton's gifts as a spellbinding movie tale-teller. After a period of confusion it becomes clear that the book's episodic form has been replaced by an overarching quest story based on the Jabberwocky nonsense poem from Looking Glass. Alice must find the Vorpel sword, a sacred Arthurian device, and choose sides between the graceful White Queen (Anne Hathaway) and the ugly, oppressive Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter). Her ultimate enemy is the latter's fearsome Jabberwock, and the film's inevitable climax is Alice got up like St George confronting this dangerous dragon. The pay-off back in the real high Victorian world is that Alice has achieved the right to become a high-ranking imperial adventurer, establishing major trade links with China. In his classic Europe Without Baedeker (1947), written during his most Anglophobic period, Edmund Wilson saw Alice as characteristic of the snobbish, overbearing, ineffably superior British upper classes, patronising everyone and undermining their confidence. He might well have seen justice in this finale, though he would have been disappointed to find it coming from a fellow American and be so totally lacking in irony.