I’ve always liked the Disney version, but I’ll admit that Alice herself has no particular character. But she is, after all, Carrol’s fantasy woman and people’s fantasies tend to be a bit shallow (see Mary Sue). But more importantly, she’s also just a narrative device to go around and encounter the weird happenings that occur in Wonderland.
And those happenings are all allusions to the world of 19th century politics, math, and social mores. So unless you’re both smart and somewhat familiar with what the world would have been like back in the day, the events are just random nonsense, and not very amusing. For someone who is enjoys riddles, math, etc. and has a bit knowledgeable or can reverse engineer from the stories what the world must have been like, the skits are quite interesting and humorous.
The problem with filming the Alice books isn’t that Alice is a dull character, it’s that most modern children probably won’t appreciate the contents and particularly not if the people writing the screenplay don’t understand the original content, and mangle it as they perform the adaptation.
Really, the best way to create a modern Alice movie, and remain true to the original Alice, would be to find all the ways that the modern world is strange and scary, such that a child might fear growing up in it, and lampoon those things. I’m pretty sure that, that was Carrol’s primary intention with the original books (and math topics that went in were more for his amusement than his target audience) and that’s what made them popular back in the 19th century. He wanted to take all the strange and scary things that Alice Liddel might fear encountering as an adult, and show that they’re all harmless nonsense. The books are a put-down of the world at that time, and it makes them not-applicable to a modern audience.
You could probably reuse the original characters, the Mad Hatter, the Walrus and the Carpenter, etc. but update the jokes to fit a modern discussion. And, if you did that, it probably wouldn’t be necessary to try and make Alice more interesting. Alice is just the camera, not the action. That still might not make it a smash hit, but it would at least be a proper Alice in Wonderland movie.