This is a very modern take on the Alice in Wonderland story. Alice, in this story, is a grown woman who teaches martial arts and has a boyfriend. (Her mother played Dr. Frasier on SG-1). Her boyfriend gets beaten and kidnapped and she sets out to find him.
He had just given her a ring and an old guy attacks her and takes the ring box from her, then jumps through a mirror. She basically falls through the mirror and enters a much changed Wonderland.
It's a world run under the dictatorship of the Red Queen, consisting of ultra-tall buildings, mostly ruins, and flying machines. The Red Queen runs a drug business where people are captured from Earth and brought to Wonderland to have their essence removed and distilled into various emotional drugs that are then made available to the people of wonderland to help keep them under control.
There is also an underground resistance to the actions of the queen, and the question becomes who are really members of this resistance and who are just posing as them. In some respects the movie also resembles material from The Prisoner, as the cards are referred to as numbers, such as Number 10, and an interrogation scene looks like it belongs in a Prisoner episode.
The queen finds out Alice has the ring and sends an assassin after her. Alice befriends a White Knight (played by the guy that does Taggart on Eureka), and the Mad Hatter (played by the young guy on Primeval). They are constantly chased and attacked and under threat.
Complicating matters is that Alice believes that her father is there, a father she has not seen since he disappeared when she was ten, so she wants to free him.
Colm Meany, from Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, plays the husband of the Red Queen. In a sort of tribute to Star Wars, there's a scene of Alice flying a device through a dense forest with others chasing her.
Much of the movie revolves around who can Alice trust and who can't she trust (again, similar to the Prisoner).
It's a really neat adaptation of the basic Alice in Wonderland mythos. The characters are well done, the story makes sense, plus there's enough action to satisfy those looking for that. Rather well done.
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Main Alice in Wonderland index page
