Here’s the non-spoiler: Tim Burton’s new Alice in Wonderland is nothing like the book. In this movie version Alice is grown up, and she enters a world that is a strange remix of two of Lewis Carroll’s novels: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There. What you will recognize are some of the characters: Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the White Rabbit, the Red Queen, the White Queen, the smoking caterpillar, and, of course, the Mad Hatter, who’s getting much of the poster time because he’s played by Burton’s favorite alter-ego, Johnny Depp. Beyond that, however, this is an entirely new work.

It’s too bad. A Tim Burton-ized retelling of any of Carroll’s stories could have been an interesting affair. But Burton and screenwriter Linda Woolverton decide to dream up their own Alice, and they don’t really add to the stories so much as confuse them. Some fundamental elements remain: Alice chasing a white rabbit (Michael Sheen) into a hole; Alice talking to the who-ing caterpillar; Alice coming upon the Mad Hatter’s tea party complete with March Hare (Paul Whitehouse). What is new consists of lumbering plot work, visual gimmicks and hyped-up effects, and fantasy battle scenes.

Burton’s Alice in Wonderland begins with an Alice who is the same age as Carroll’s, but we quickly flash forward to meet Alice (Mia Wasikowska) at 19-years-old. She is led to a fancy garden party where she discovers she is going to be proposed to by an oafish young lord. She flees the scene, falling down a rabbit hole, and goes through the big-small, drink-pill Jefferson Airplane routine. After she makes her way into Wonderland, she meets the expected succession of characters – the caterpillar, white rabbit, Tweedledee and Tweedledum – and discovers that they are waiting for an “Alice” to return to Wonderland because there is a prophesy that says she will save them from the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter). Alice doesn’t think she is that Alice, but is then launched through a journey of self-discovery as she is hunted by the queen’s men. Along the way she befriends the Mad Hatter (Johnney Depp) who is re-imagined here as a kind of sensitive Willy Wonka / rebel fighter. It all culminates with Alice emerging in a glittery armored suit and a jewel-lined sword, ready to fight the Jabberwocky, which, come to think of it, makes sense given the rest of the nonsense.

Like a Harry Potter movie, Alice in Wonderland unfolds in one great linear plot line filled with lots of jingly lingo and superfluous details. Somewhere in there is a fable about Alice learning to choose her own destiny, to stop letting others push her through life. Burton also seems be trying to re-imagine the Mad Hatter so that he emerges as one of the filmmaker’s favored craftsman-dreamer heroes. However, pushing the Hatter to the forefront proves a stretch. There is one nice bit of dialogue between Alice and the Hatter in which the Hatter realizes he is a figment of Alice’s imagination, a player in her dream, and that when she wakes up he will cease to exist. It’s a rare moment of interest and emotion. But this still has to be a story about Alice, and Depp’s Hatter seems lost in everything else that is going on.

The truth is, I’m hard-pressed to think of a Tim Burton movie I have really enjoyed, with Big Fish being the possible exception (and, okay, I loved Beetle Juice when I was 12). They always seem mired in design, stuck in concept. They are visually seductive and have this mad, fairy tale power that makes you really want to like them, want to think they are something more than what they are. But something about his films feel hollow, and Alice in Wonderland is no exception. Spectacle pushes aside everything else. Character quirks are passed off as character traits. There’s lots of imagining, but not much that is imaginative. His films often purport to be fairy tales, but lack the vivid, broad-stroke characters that seem realer than real. In Alice and Wonderland, Burton has made Carroll’s stories less surreal and puzzling, thereby removing much of the fun (as opposed to the ingenious Alice (1988), by Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer, which actually ups the weirdness, thereby making a comparable translation of Lewis Carroll to the screen). Though visually arresting, it’s a world that doesn’t bewilder or mystify, and we’re left wondering what makes this a wonderland in the first place.