Welcome to a land where Johnny Depp is the Mad Hatter, his dialect flipping between an English lisp and a Scottish brogue, Alice is a 19-year-old who barely remembers her first visit down the rabbit hole and the computer-generated 3-D environment looks a little like the planet Pandora from Avatar, but not as cool.

“Don’t you remember it here?” asks the Mad Hatter.

Alice in Wonderland, released this weekend to theatres, is Tim Burton’s reinvention of Lewis Carroll’s original.

The film begins as Alice, played by Australian actress Mia Wasikowska, is proposed to by the dim-witted Hamish at a Victorian party that looks suspiciously similar to the Red Queen’s croquet court. Alice is distracted by the March Hare, who is looking rather late for a very important date. The hare leads Alice into the English countryside, back down the rabbit hole and then the fun begins.

For the most part, the characters are marvelous. The Red Queen, played by Burton’s wife Helena Bonham Carter, has a bulbous head, electric blue eye shadow fit for a ninth-grade school dance and a filthy tongue.

“I love my fat boys,” she says, resting her feet on a live pig and watching Tweedledum and Tweedledee blunder about.

Wasikowsksa’s Alice is a wide-eyed and frighteningly beautifulcharacter. Her performance nails a fully-rounded Alice who seems neither at home in the English countryside or in Wonderland. Wasikowsksa’s character grounds a film that would otherwise be floating away with the Mad Hatter’s gibberish and the disappearing Cheshire Cat.

The first 30 minutes of the film had the audience holding their breath for Depp’s entrance as the Mad Hatter. Depp’s costume, makeup and dialect are perfectly nutty, but there seems to be something a bit off about his performance. Perhaps he had too much Willy Wonka in him to create a fresh Mad Hatter. Or maybe it’s because there seemed to be an eerie lust between Depp and Wasikowsksa’s character.

“You could just stay here,” says Depp, as Alice is about to leave Wonderland for the reality of England.

In the end, the parts of this movie (although often beautiful, witty and able to invoke a sense of nostalgia) don’t seem to make a whole. The plot is driven by the fact that Alice needs to kill the Jabberwocky in order to bring down the Red Queen.

The audience is left with questions. Why does it need to be Alice who defeats the creature? Why does Alice go ahead with the idea? And what’s so darn scary about the Jabberwocky, anyway?

The film meanders through Wonderland without having fully developed a sense of purpose, forgetting that the audience — although most likely delighted with the world Burton has created — is always looking for one thing: story.