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| Directed by James Bobin Written by Linda Woolverton |
Alo Party Peoples.
The main problem with making Alice in Wonderland into a movie is that it has no real plot. It's a series of loosely connected scenes barely tied together by dream logic, the kind of hallucinatory weirdness that's always worked better in literature than in any other medium. The original Disney film understood that, so instead of trying to cobble together a plot, they just made a bunch of shorts and strung them together. It's a nonsense story at its core, so when you try to force order and logic and structure onto it like the live-action films have done, you can only end up with a convoluted mess.
It's annoying, because we've seen that Disney is more than capable of doing good work when they remake their animated canon. If you could get someone with the same reverence and grace that Kenneth Branagh brought to Cinderella, or the sense of majesty and awe that Jon Faverau brought to The Jungle Book, then you could have gotten something great out of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. Those names should go together like a match made in heaven, but Burton's lack of restraint and Disney's lack of willingness to reign in an A-list name like his resulted in an enthusiastic teenager's incredibly simplistic fanfiction about Alice returning to Wonderland years later to fulfill a prophecy that she overthrow the Queen of Hearts and also get past the shadow of her dead father who was a great merchant in China, I think? It's the same kind of dream logic as the original, but with a semblance of structure stretched over it like a hyperactive child playing dress-up with their father's Sunday best.
See if you can make sense of what they cooked up for the sequel; Alice has become a successful merchant in the South China sea, and she's just gotten back to London from a three year voyage, where she finds that her mother has sold her house to the guy who she refused to marry in the first movie, and she can only get it back by giving up her father's ship. Understandably frustrated with this, Alice runs off and falls through a magic mirror back into Wonderland where she discovers that the Mad Hatter is dying of grief because he's convinced himself that his tragic backstory dead family isn't dead, so Alice steals a magic ball from Time Himself in order to save his family, but doing so is likely to unravel the past so Time chases her down and also the Queen of Hearts wants to steal the magic ball herself in order to undo an incident in her past that led to her becoming mad...
That... is actually the kind of half-formed strangeness one would expect from an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, the first one had just enough structure to keep it from becoming a so-bad-it's-good "ironic" thing, but Through The Looking Glass doesn't even pretend to be an adaptation of either Alice book, which allows it to get straight up bonkers a lot of the time. Brightening up the color palette is a really smart move that makes it more pleasing to gawk at and much better suited for IMAX. It also means that the production design and costumes get to be genuinely creative instead of relying on Tim Burton's fetish for cartoonishly exaggerated Gothic grimness. The performances are similarly fresh, Sasha Baron Cohen as Time is a campy caricature, but it's fun campy caricature which fits with the tone, Helena Bonham Carter's Queen of Hearts gets to fully embrace the pettiness that was only glimpsed in the first film, and if nothing else, Mia Wasikowska continues to look stunning in Victorian period dress.
Through The Looking Glass is a better film, but that really isn't saying much. It occasionally gets the dream-like tone right, and if you can bring yourself to surrender and fall into the screen and get lost in it's over-designed digital madness, then you might enjoy it - I imagine it'd be a great drug trip movie. But if you actually want some substance to go with the spectacle, then I'm afraid you're out of luck, since, like the first one, Through The Looking Glass is still a work of nonsense; one more in keeping with the whimsical spirit of the books, granted, but still a piece of nonsense.
See if you can make sense of what they cooked up for the sequel; Alice has become a successful merchant in the South China sea, and she's just gotten back to London from a three year voyage, where she finds that her mother has sold her house to the guy who she refused to marry in the first movie, and she can only get it back by giving up her father's ship. Understandably frustrated with this, Alice runs off and falls through a magic mirror back into Wonderland where she discovers that the Mad Hatter is dying of grief because he's convinced himself that his tragic backstory dead family isn't dead, so Alice steals a magic ball from Time Himself in order to save his family, but doing so is likely to unravel the past so Time chases her down and also the Queen of Hearts wants to steal the magic ball herself in order to undo an incident in her past that led to her becoming mad...
That... is actually the kind of half-formed strangeness one would expect from an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, the first one had just enough structure to keep it from becoming a so-bad-it's-good "ironic" thing, but Through The Looking Glass doesn't even pretend to be an adaptation of either Alice book, which allows it to get straight up bonkers a lot of the time. Brightening up the color palette is a really smart move that makes it more pleasing to gawk at and much better suited for IMAX. It also means that the production design and costumes get to be genuinely creative instead of relying on Tim Burton's fetish for cartoonishly exaggerated Gothic grimness. The performances are similarly fresh, Sasha Baron Cohen as Time is a campy caricature, but it's fun campy caricature which fits with the tone, Helena Bonham Carter's Queen of Hearts gets to fully embrace the pettiness that was only glimpsed in the first film, and if nothing else, Mia Wasikowska continues to look stunning in Victorian period dress.
Through The Looking Glass is a better film, but that really isn't saying much. It occasionally gets the dream-like tone right, and if you can bring yourself to surrender and fall into the screen and get lost in it's over-designed digital madness, then you might enjoy it - I imagine it'd be a great drug trip movie. But if you actually want some substance to go with the spectacle, then I'm afraid you're out of luck, since, like the first one, Through The Looking Glass is still a work of nonsense; one more in keeping with the whimsical spirit of the books, granted, but still a piece of nonsense.
Have a nice day,
Greg.B
FINAL RATING: 3/5
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