Those dark, strange classics of Victorian literature, allegedly written for children, Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" and its sequel, "Through the Looking Glass," unsurprisingly inspire a number of film adaptations. Their fantastic plots, grotesque settings, and bizarre characters seem perfectly suited for the magic of the cinema, an art that by its very nature deals in the stuff of fantasy and dream. Given his penchant for the weird and marvelous, and a history of significant achievement in animation and special effects, Tim Burton should be just the right director to record the adventures of yet another Alice.

Despite that background and his obvious qualifications (and perhaps even an eccentricity that resembles the author's), Burton's new "Alice in Wonderland" only rarely enlivens the rich material Carroll bequeathed to generations of artists in various media. Applying his own stamp to the source, Burton changes a good deal of the famous story, beginning with the age and personality of the eponymous heroine, no longer a naive prepubescent girl, but a 19-year-old young woman (Mia Wasikowska) pressured to accept a marriage proposal from an insufferable aristocratic twit.

In front of an expectant crowd of proper Victorians at a posh garden party, Alice flees the proposal, chasing that famous White Rabbit down the hole, tumbling into a strange new world, this time around not Wonderland, but Underland. She encounters the familiar cast of characters, just the sort of creatures to delight a director like Burton - Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Cheshire Cat, the hookah-smoking caterpillar, the scary Bandersnatch, and above all, the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) and the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter).

The elevation of Depp's character to greater importance in Burton's version makes a good deal of sense, since he serves as the director's alter ego in a number of pictures. Here, made up in luminescent green, wearing an orange fright wig that looks electrified, attired in exaggerated 19th century haute couture that frequently changes color, babbling in a variety of British accents, and occasionally giggling hysterically, Depp draws all the attention away from Wasikowska's Alice, a vapid, immature, generally uninteresting young woman.

A conflict right out of English history between two rival sisters, the wicked Red Queen and the good White Queen (Anne Hathaway) supplies the major source of action in the film. When the Red Queen's playing cards square off in a grand battle against the White Queen's chess pieces, a reluctant Alice finds she must serve as the champion of the White Queen and slay the Jabberwock, the dragon of Carroll's poem, which comes alive in the movie.

Aside from Depp's typically outrageous impersonation of the Hatter, very little in the way of acting works in the film. Helena Bonham Carter's lightbulb head and pinched features may display the wonders of the makeup artists but do little to evoke emotion beyond making her look somehow both grotesque and silly.

Despite the rich and varied possibilities in the original source and his own track record, the director turns "Alice in Wonderland" into a surprisingly dull and incoherent motion picture. He only intermittently exploits the possibilities of 3-D, which should provide a most propitious medium for Carroll's and Burton's imaginations, so that only rarely something pokes out of the screen or a particular metamorphosis, like the Cheshire Cat's arrivals and departures, creates any of the expected delight.

With the cinematic resources available to a filmmaker these days, including not only the familiar digital technology but also the opportunity to shoot in three dimensions, "Alice in Wonderland" should provide the opportunity to make a spectacular motion picture. Burton interprets his source in some original ways, but barely scratches the surface of its full possibilities. In the hands of an imaginative and original director like Tim Burton, the dream journey of a prepubescent girl through a world that alternates between amusing fantasy and sheer nightmare could be another "Wizard of Oz," but this oddly perfunctory version of "Alice" suggests that the material defeated the director.