This weekend, SyFy’s modern re-imagining of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” features an adult Alice (Caterine Scorsone) that needs to rescue her fiancé (Philip Winchester) from the Queen of Hearts (Kathy Bates). How is this “Alice” a modern look at the classic tale?
For one, the landscape of this new Wonderland is made up of skyscrapers and structures built out of cards. Director Nick Willing (“Tin Man”) talks about the art direction of “Alice”:
“The look of the film, we’ve got this kind of exciting, funky twist to the look, but retro modern. The first thing that tickled my fancy was the idea of imagining Wonderland as it is today, 150 years on from the original. [Alice’s Adventures] in Wonderland was written 150 years ago, and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be delicious to imagine that world, in the way that we have evolved, also changed? How would it be today? Perhaps we’d have similar characters, but wouldn’t they be different? And wouldn’t they have similar quests?'”
Willing updates the plot in “Alice” as well. In this modern plot, Alice discovers that the Queen of Hearts has been abducting people from our world and taking away their memories. These wiped people, called Oysters, gamble away their emotions that are bottled by the Queen, sold, and served up to the people of Wonderland. Willing describes where this inspiration of this plot comes from:
“What I was interested in was [the idea of] being able to manufacture your emotions. One of the things I fear may happen to us is that we swap genuine emotions for something that is given to us. We cry at the television commercial and think that those tears are genuine. I was fascinated with, not so much in how these things could be addictive, but how we are slowly constructing a world where we swap genuine emotions or something which is manufactured cheaply. Wonderland seemed to be a good place to set that in because the Queen of Hearts has that kind of personality in the book.”
Some of the classic elements of Alice are also present with a sci-fi twist- this “Alice”s Jabberwocky is made with visual effects tech. Willing talks about this expression of the character:
“I’ve never seen a jabberwock done before. There was a film by Terry Gilliam, but that was years ago and it only had fleeting glimpses of the actual jabberwock in that film. Now technology has caught up with me and we were able to produce this amazing creature with a long neck and a goofy face, that was both funny and terrifying at the same time, which I think is what the jabberwock is all about. [It] looked astonishingly like the [John] Tenniel drawings from the original.”
Another technological translation transforms Alice’s flamingo that she rides while playing croquet into a Vespa-like vehicle. Director Nick Willing (Tin Man) explains this sci-fi interpretation:
“I translated that into a flying-machine flamingo that she has to sit on and manipulate its pink neck to make it fly. It sort of looks like a Vespa, a cross between a jet ski or Vespa, but that flies. That was very delicious.”
“Alice” wouldn’t be complete without some kind of evil twist! Tweedledee and Tweedledum for instance are darker and twisted for Willing:
“I always thought Tweedledee and Tweedledum as torturous of her. I felt that they were like nasty little schoolboys who want to pull the wings off flies and torture little girls. That’s the opportunity they got for Alice. So in the film I actually made them the Queen’s torturers and torture poor old Alice. So the book was kind of a trigger, an inspiration, and then from there it spawned many things.”
Watch out for other classic characters to emerge in this modern version of “Alice” tonight! Watch “Alice” on SyFy tonight at 9 p.m. ET/PT and concludes tomorrow at the same time slot.
[Source] SyFy
