Alice Through the Looking Glass

So much for The Jungle Book starting the trend of good live-action adaptations of old Disney classics…

Alice Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to the original 2010 live-action adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, takes places years after the first and follows Alice (Mia Wasikowska) as she travels back to Wonderland…er Underland, to help save the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) from essentially dying of a broken heart. In order to do so, Alice takes it upon herself to steal a device called the Chronosphere from Time himself (Sacha Baron Cohen) so she can travel back to the past and prevent the Hatter’s woes from ever happening, thus saving him in the present. Of course such an accomplishment is easier said than done, and soon enough both the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and Time are hot on her heels to retrieve the Chronosphere and stop her in her tracks.

First things first: this is a bad movie. So was the first, but at least that one sort of had something to go on based on the fact that the filmmakers took some cues from the original book. I personally disliked it, very much so, not only because I’m a huge fan of the original Disney animated film but also more so because it just plain sucked in more ways than I can count. Wonderland was dreary and empty, devoid of any actual wonder, the special effects teetered from being pretty awful to looking disturbingly off, and most of all, the acting was wholly annoying and cheesy and so uninspired that it’s a surprise how this vision of Wonderland even got off the ground in the first place. How the film crossed a billion dollars worldwide is beyond me, and while I enjoyed this sequel slightly more than the first, I still think it ranks as one of the worst movies of the year.

To be fair, the overall idea of this film is way more interesting than the first, but still falters and falls just the same. With some potential bubbling to the surface in the form of the Time character, the Chronosphere itself, and a much more fun and stylized version of Wonderland , I thought the filmmakers had found a way to sidestep the original’s obvious flaws, but alas, this is one big ol’ steaming pile of meh.

As I said before, the flaws inherent in the original film are still here: bad acting, better, yet still barely passable special effects, a story that goes really nowhere etc etc. My main problem with this movie that the last film didn’t even try to attempt was the forced emotion present for most of its runtime. The filmmakers never really built up Alice or the Hatter as real characters, so why choose a plotline for this sequel that banks hard on trying to get the audience to care about these characters like they actually have something invested in them? I don’t care that the Hatter is dying; I don’t care if Alice needs to save him, and I sure as Hell don’t care if she ends up screwing with time so badly that it stops altogether (more on that later).

The plot leans too heavily on connections that we never made with these characters and with a potentially really cool mechanic available to the screenwriters with the character of Time and the plot device that is the Chronosphere, why not explore one of literally hundreds of other storylines that the combination of these two fresh ideas could have brought us? I just don’t get it. On top of that, I really hate the fact that yet again, two films in a row, Alice is oblivious to everything going on around her. The first film saw her deny that she was in Wonderland and that she wasn’t actually imagining it all for basically the entire runtime, and the sequel sees her literally destroy all of time after committing a crime of theft by trickery and selfishness. The script tries to make Time out to be a bad guy, but as far as I could tell, he’s the only sane voice in the entire film! Sure he’s shacking up with the Red Queen, but for the entire movie he’s trying to tell Alice that she’s literally going to make time stop if she continues with her shit, but somehow this fact eludes her until a convenient point in the script. Again, I just don’t get it.

As for the good stuff, there’s not much saving this train wreck. There’s a pretty intense scene towards the end of the film as time ending becomes a very real threat, a handful of scenes that are pretty good whenever Sacha Baron Cohen shows up, a more visually pleasing representation of Wonderland, some pretty cool “Ocean of Time” effects, and a quick yet interesting detour into the past to see a few characters in their early years. These scenes do enough to help me not straight up hate the film, but that’s about all they do.

Long review short; let’s hope we don’t get any more sequels to this version of Wonderland in any way shape or form for the foreseeable future.