Alice in Wonderland starts with a young Alice constantly plagued by nightmares. Delirious, she asks her father (Marton Csokas) if she has gone mad. He replies, “I'm afraid so. You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret. All the best people are.” Somehow this sounds like a cry from director Tim Burton.

Alice (Mia Wasikowska, who stumbles through the film in an open-eyed stupor) is now 19 and pale-faced — a trademark fetish she shares with most of Burton's female leads — and she “doesn't quite fit into Victorian society and structure.”

After the death of her father, Alice is invited to her own engagement party, one she didn't know about, and decides to run after a strange white rabbit (who talks to her later through the voice of Michael Sheen). As the story goes, she falls into a rabbit hole in a tree — a subway of falling pianos and cliff-side beds, one of which she bounces off from — into Underland.

Underland is an eccentric and dismal dreamscape run over with grinning, disappearing cats (Stephen Fry) and chain-smoking doleful caterpillars (Alan Rickman). It also has one of its few distinctly human-looking people — the Mad Hatter — a pathetically heartfelt, mad-eyed oddity played by Johnny Depp with limited pomposity (he has little to do in the film).

Depp is a carrot-top and his face is bleached Kabuki-white, but that's as far as he goes with his joker persona. His Mad Hatter is benevolent, delicate and conflicted, and he's built up from the single-lined stereotype he's written in other adaptations (he only shows a flicker of madness in one slight scene).

The screenplay by Linda Woolverton consistently yells about the authenticity of this visiting Alice without conviction. Is this the same Alice who visited Underland in her childhood? Have all memories of her previous adventures evaporated from her consciousness? At least Alice thinks so. Alice (as vehement as Mia Wasikowska can be) believes she's in a dream even when she is poked in the foot with a thick needle or cut by the beastly bulldog-like Bandersnatch.

The recurring characters strewn away (mostly in distracting 3D) every five minutes speak in a hush, about the prophesised coming of a savior who will slay the Jabberwock — a lizard-tongued dragon voiced by Christopher Lee — the guardian of the Red Queen Iracebeth (Helena Bonham Carter plays the portentous bobble-head doll on a mean streak who shines as much as Johnny Depp), who's taken over Underland by stealing the ruling crown from Miranda, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway).

Knowing Tim Burton's take on remakes (he shifts them into his own mould rather than remake original materials), think of this Alice in Wonderland as an extension of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Burton, the once consistent, extraordinaire of strange, quirky and weird, flaunts only signs of his rousing lunacy without indulging in them (he does that in every other film now). Like Big Fish, Alice in Wonderland feels too overworked on paper. It builds on a frantic pace and shuns any connection with the audience. We wouldn't care if anyone would have died in the film (there is one decapitation and many “Off with his head!” yells from Bonham Carter).

What this adaptation needs is a touch of Neil Gaiman, the British comic book extraordinaire who wrote Coraline and Mirror Mask, two mesmerising re-imaginations of Alice and her Wonderland. Or it could have been as tenderly nifty as Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow or Burton's last Sweeney Todd — The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (all three are Johnny Depp collaborations). Maybe it could have been as over-the-top as Beetlejuice. But it isn't. What it is is safe and controlled. Like its flamboyant 3D cinematography.

Rated PG-13, Alice's fantasy is a faux spectacle teeming with modern screenwriting, flavourless and at times worn-out storytelling that has an unswerving craving to be different.

Quick Prediction “Movie-goers (are) Mad about Alice,” says the headline at Boxofficemojo.com — a box-office data tracking web site. Debuting on the star power of Johnny Depp, Tim Burton and the recently inflamed draw of 3D, Alice in Wonderland opened with a staggering $116 million in the US, with a total of $210 million worldwide.

“Showing on approximately 7,400 screens at 3,728 sites, Alice in Wonderland's opening stands as not only the all-time biggest for the month of March, but as the highest-grossing ever for a movie released outside of May, July or November and sixth overall,” the site reported.

Lewis Carroll's weird and wonderful characters also topped the blue-skinned Na'vi from Avatar by an $80 million opening in 3D on 2,251 sites (Avatar opened to $55 million and 2,038).

Opening at this breakneck momentum, Alice in Wonderland still has enough spur to outlast big releases such as Green Zone starring Matt Damon, the romantic-drama Remember Me with Robert Pattinson and the comedy, She's Out of My League. Budgeted at $200 million, expect Alice's numbers to settle somewhere in the late $500 millions.