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Alice Through The Looking Glass review: “A rather palatable sequel”

Alice Through The Looking Glass review: Can Johnny Depp and co. surpass the massive success of Disney's $1bn grossing Alice In Wonderland?
By Paul Heath -
May 10, 2016


Alice Through The Looking Glass review: James Bobin takes the directing reigns from Tim Burton for Disney’s second live-action cinematic outing, adapted from Lewis Carroll’s classic books.

Disney follow-up their huge $1 billion + grossing Alice In Wonderland. Here’s our Alice Through The Looking Glass review.

Tim Burton‘s first movie in this series, Alice In Wonderland from 2010 left a bad taste in the mouth for most critics, mine included, but audiences lapped up his adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s book in their millions. The film was a huge gamble for Disney at the time, with the movie apparently costing around $200 million to make, but it returned over $334 million on domestic soil alone, and over $1 billion in total around the world.

A sequel was a given, even though we had to wait nearly six years for it. Alice Through The Looking Glass is positioned a third of the way through a year when the studio are enjoying huge success, following their superb Zootropolis (easily the best film we’ve seen this year), and the recent adaptation of The Jungle Book (not forgetting their other owned properties, Captain America: Civil War and the forthcoming Pixar sequel Finding Dory).

Taking over the directing reigns from Tim Burton, who remains on as producer, is The Muppets and The Muppets: Most Wanted helmer James Bobin. If there was anyone who had the chops to take over from such a visionary director such as Burton, it is the the Muppets alumni, and frequent helmer on such TV shows as Flight Of The Conchords and Da Ali G Show. Here Bobin brings on board Ali G himself in Sacha Baron Cohen who plays the character of Time, easily the best thing about the movie, who even manages to upstage a returning Johnny Depp as The Mad Hatter. Back in the title role is rather superb Mia Wasikowska, who must return to Wonderland to save the Hatter, who has become even madder in a matter that concerns the fate of his late parents. Seemingly, only Alice can save her old friend, so she turns to Time himself to see if he can help her out. When he warns ger of the dangers of altering the past, she takes matters into her own hands by ‘borrowing’ the Chronosphere, a device that can take you any moment in time gone by.

Joining in for some more fun are Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway, who reprise their roles as the warring sisters, the Red Queen and the White Queen, Stephen Fry, who is seen fleetingly as the Cheshire Cat, and Alan Rickman in his final role as Absolem The Caterpillar, who has now transformed into a butterfly, and leads Alice back to Wonderland. There are also appearances from the likes of Matt Lucas as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Rhys Ifans as Zanik Hightopp, the Mad Hatter’s father and Andrew Scott as Addison Bennett.

What grabs you immediately is Bobin’s impression on the film. A wonderful opening set-piece sets the scene beautifully in the real world, along with some glorious visuals of the iconic Gloucester Docks, the director choosing to use real locations as opposed to grand CGI ones. Of course, once we’re back in Wonderland, we’re on familiar territory although in varying times, which gives as slightly different feel to the overall movie. Depp, whose role is as front and centre as it possible could be is excellent in a role he clearly enjoys to play, as too does Wasikowsa, who relishes the opportunity to play such a strong female role. There are strong turns by Ed Speleers, who we need to see more of in film, and a fleeting extended cameo from Andrew Scott, but it is Sacha Baron Cohen who steals the show as Time, the actor and comedian knocking out a dastardly but delightful turn.

Alice Through The Looking Glass does suffer from some of the same issues as it predecessor. It feels slightly over-long, is an absolute onslaught on the senses and almost has too much going on at any one time. That said, I enjoyed it much more than Alice In Wonderland. Lots more.

Johnny Depp and Sacha Baron Cohen are at the top of their game, and when you stand back to try and take it all in, the film actually is much more digestible than Burton’s 2010 film.

A dazzling, delicious, visual treat. No, really.

Alice Through The Looking Glass review by Paul Heath, May 2016.

Den Of Geek@denofgeek

Here's our review of Alice Through The Looking Glass http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/alice-t ... ing-glass-

Alice Through The Looking Glass review
Review Rob Leane
10 May 2016 - 23:00

James Bobin takes over from Tim Burton in Alice Through The Looking Glass, in which Sacha Baron Cohen steals the show...

It’s quite rare that a CGI-infested 3D movie genuinely feasts your eyes, so first and foremost Alice Through The Looking Glass - the follow-on from Tim Burton's $1bn grossing Alice In Wonderland - deserves praise for looking utterly stunning. Colleen Atwood’s costumes are gloriously over-the-top, and Disney’s finest VFX geniuses have blended their work in with surprising seamlessness to help convey some giant, attention-grabbing ideas as well as quirky background details.

This time, we open with Mia Wasikowska’s Alice out at sea and very much in the real world. She’s a boat captain now, instantly demanding your attention with her inventive problem solving skills and action prowess. One of the criticisms of Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland was that the Hatter and his chums overshadowed Alice somewhat, and it’s easy to read this scene as James Bobin (Burton’s successor in the director’s chair) attempting to remedy that right off the bat.

After this effective opening, its not long until Alice finds herself lured back to Wonderland (or Underland, as we’re meant to call it in this incarnation). An all-too-brief cameo from the late Alan Rickman’s Absolem will delight your eardrums around this stage, serving as a welcome reminder of how much the great man could achieve with just a few lines and his instantly recognisable vocal chords.

Linda Woolverton’s screenplay patiently rebuilds the wackiness of this big screen take on Lewis Carroll’s world, taking the time to nod to some iconic fairytales and lark around a bit before getting around to the small matters of villains and plotlines. This is a welcome decision, allowing us to enjoy the company of Alice for a bit before the serious stuff gets going.

The film really picks up when Sacha Baron Cohen arrives. He’s playing the physical manifestation of Time, a baddie who ‘waits for no man’ (amongst other puns) and dresses so ridiculously that he has to have the corridors of his evil lair especially made to allow space for his gargantuan shoulder pads. The Hatter and The White Queen have come up with a crackpot scheme to alter history, and Alice is sent off to nick a McGuffin from Time himself to make it happen.

The exact reasons for his timeline fiddling are perhaps the film’s biggest weakness (they seem a lot like a shoehorned-in excuse for more Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway and Helena Bonham Carter scenes, even though their characters’ story is already finished), but it’s hard to mind too much when you look at what they enable.

After all, this is the funniest Sacha Baron Cohen performance in years. Time is one of the most inept screen villains in recent memory, and in barking orders at his minions (a troop of equally-naff-at-their-jobs robots called ‘seconds’) he raises a lot of big laughs. He’s so verbose that he carries a little dictionary around, and is so easily lampooned that he’s quickly established as the film’s MVP upon arrival.

Movies like Frozen, Inside Out and Zootropolis have reminded us recently that family films can carry important lessons for young people. And through its presentation of time, Alice Through The Looking Glass stakes a decent claim for a seat at this table. The film uses the zaniness of Sacha Baron Cohen (who gets a terrific manually-operated time machine to himself) and some eye-catching visuals to play with the idea that time cannot be stopped, and that it’s much easier to learn something from history than it is to change it.

Unfortunately, problems do hold the film back. The whole reason the narrative drive kicks off is highly questionable, and – in being shackled to Burton’s Alice In Wonderland by nature of being its sequel – Alice Through The Looking Glass also repeats the same issues that the last film had.

Seeing Johnny Depp pull funny faces and teeter around on his tip-toes isn’t as engaging as it was a decade or so ago, and the novelty factor of Helena Bonham Carter having a massive head has also worn off. Anne Hathaway spends much too much time waving limp fingers around in the air, too. If you weren’t a huge fan of the previous movie, these things seem likely to grate with you as they did with me. But that’s not to say that these characters don’t get a few interesting moments alongside the re-treaded material (the Hatter, for one, gets a great bit near the end).

But still, Alice Through The Looking Glass comes alive when it sticks with its own original ideas. Sacha Baron Cohen raises a chuckle nine times out of ten, the visuals are strong, and Mia Wasikowska is this time given plenty of opportunities to paint Alice as a headstrong protagonist well worth watching. The schtick of Burton’s take still lingers, but there’s plenty to enjoy here.

Film Review: ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’
Senior Features Writer
Andrew Barker
Senior Features Writer @barkerrant

May 10, 2016 | 03:00PM PT

“The ‘why?’ cannot, and need not, be put into words.” So wrote Lewis Carroll in the introduction to “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground,” and his advice goes sadly unheeded in “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” James Bobin’s sequel to Tim Burton’s massively lucrative “Alice in Wonderland.” Taking Carroll’s anything-goes psychedelic setting and painting it over with a drab time-travel plot and thoroughly beige origin stories for otherwise colorful characters, this lackluster go-round is a mercenary backward step for Disney’s live-action excavations of its animated back catalog, which enjoyed a mighty leap forward only a few weeks ago with Jon Favreau’s “The Jungle Book.”

Though it’s unlikely to equal the billion-dollar-plus worldwide tally of its 2010 predecessor, “Looking Glass” should fare well enough commercially, thanks to its day-glow production design, busy CGI and assorted other shiny things. But as Carroll himself put it, “it’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” While he can’t really offer a substitute for the dark wit that Burton brings even to his lesser outings, new director Bobin is hardly out of his element. As demonstrated in his first two “Muppets” features, he’s got fine comic timing, and his ability to handle nonstop digital spectacle keeps “Alice” visually consistent and coherent even as it offers one spread of eye-candy after another.

The problem with “Alice” is its lack of narrative imagination. For example, in Disney’s first animated crack at the tale back in 1951, the Mad Hatter’s madness existed a priori; like his famous riddle, “why is a raven like a writing desk?” the point was that it has no solution. Yet “Alice” assumes we need the most literal of answers, retconning a whole parallel world distinguished precisely by its lack of logic and forcing it to comply with the most shopworn of templates. (Yet paradoxically, the plot is still often hard to follow.)

The Mad Hatter, as in the last installment, is played by Johnny Depp with a shock of orange hair, clown makeup and pupils dilated to psilocybic proportions. Though his Wonderland home has been peaceful since the banishment of the evil Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), he’s nonetheless fallen into a deep funk, struggling to deal with lingering Oedipal issues and the death of his family in an unfortunate Jabberwocky incident. To the rescue, eventually, comes Alice Kinsleigh (Mia Wasikowska).

When we first meet back up with our twentysomething heroine, she’s in command of a ship pursued by pirates. It initially scans as a dream sequence, with Alice employing some Tony Hawk nautical strategies to evade her pursuers, but this is indeed the real world: As hinted at the end of the previous film, Alice has been carving out trade routes to China as a sort of girl-power colonialist on her ship the Wonder, only to arrive back home in London to face some difficult real-estate negotiations with her foppish former suitor, Hamish (Leo Bill).

Fortunately, this real-world framing doesn’t take up too much time, and Alice soon slips through a mirror into Wonderland, reuniting with old friends Tweedledee/Tweedledum (Matt Lucas), the White Rabbit (Michael Sheen), the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry) and the White Queen (Anne Hathaway). They’re all worried about the depressed Hatter, and the White Queen dispatches Alice to travel back into the past to save his family.

To unstick herself from time, Alice has to steal a steampunky gyroscope contraption called the Chronosphere, from its owner, Time itself (a mugging, mustachioed Sacha Baron Cohen). Occupying the film’s best new setting (a giant clock) and outfitted with its best new costume (including a giant clock breastplate), Time is a hulking, German-accented taskmaster, in command of a slew of bumbling brass minions who combine to form terrifying robotic henchmen when trouble arises. (Cribbing from the “Transformers” franchise is rarely a good look, yet here we are.)

The banished Red Queen is busy trying to sweet-talk her way to the Chronosphere as well, but Alice gets hold of it first, and meets up with progressively younger versions of the Hatter and his disapproving father (Rhys Ifans) as she time-travels. The young Red Queen is here in the past as well, and we get to see the origins of her evil, her catchphrase and her giant head – none of them remotely worth the trouble.

There’s nothing technically wrong with the film. The computer effects are loud and occasionally obnoxious, yet skillfully designed; Colleen Atwood’s costumes are lavish; and most of the performances (especially Hathaway’s dizzy White Queen) chew just the right amount of scenery. The question is simply why, given the wealth of possibilities in Carroll’s works, would you tell a story inspired more by “Back to the Future II” and Burton’s least successful additions to “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”?

Or, for that matter, “Return to Oz.” In this film’s wildest derivation from the tone of the source material, we see Alice, thrust back into the real world, strapped to a bed in a Victorian insane asylum. Even after she escapes, she’s still faced with a Sophie’s choice: In order to save her family’s home, she must sell her prized ship. “Sign over the Wonder,” she gasps, “and give up the impossible?” Alas, that ship has already sailed.

Film Review: 'Alice Through the Looking Glass'
Reviewed at DGA Theater, Los Angeles, April 29, 2016. MPAA rating: PG. Running time: 113 MIN.
Production

A Walt Disney Pictures release and presentation of a Roth Films, Team Todd, Tim Burton production. Produced by Joe Roth, Suzanne Todd, Jennifer Todd, Tim Burton. Executive producer, John G. Scotti.
Crew

Directed by James Bobin. Screenplay, Linda Woolverton, based on characters created by Lewis Carroll. Camera (color), Stuart Dryburgh; editor, Andrew Weisblum; music, Danny Elfman; production designer, Dan Hennah; costume designer, Colleen Atwood; set decorators, Anna Lynch-Robinson, Ra Vincent; sound (Dolby Digital), John Midgley; supervising sound editor, Al Nelson; re-recording mixers, Michael Semanick, David Parker; visual effects, Sony Pictures Imageworks; assistant director, Richard Goodwin; second-unit camera, Shaun O’Dell; casting, Lucy Bevan, John Papsidera.

With Mia Wasikowska, Anne Hathaway, Johnny Depp, Rhys Ifans, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen, Lindsay Duncan, Leo Bill; voices: Alan Rickman, Stephen Fry, Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall

Alter Bekannter- Ra Vincent ! Witzig, dass auch hier Rhys Ifans mit dabei ist- ob sie sich da schon kennengelernt haben?

Ob Richard, King under the mountain of Underland wohl auch mal in einer Kritik erwähnt werden wird???

Rhys Ifans ist mit Anna Friel liiert - spätestens das dürfte eine Bekanntschaft begünstigt haben.
Danke für den Thread, Laudine!

Er war mit ihr liiert.

Danke für den neuen Thread und die ersten Reviews, Laudine!

'Alice Through the Looking Glass': Critics Lament, "All Frosting, No Cake"

4:33 PM PDT 5/27/2016 by Jennifer Konerman


" 'Alice Through the Looking Glass' is a movie for anyone who skimmed a passage of Lewis Carroll and thought, 'This is great, but it could use a bit more "Terminator." ' "

Alice Through the Looking Glass brings back Mia Wasikowska's Alice, Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter and the rest of Wonderland in the sequel to the 2010 Tim Burton film.

The sequel, which also stars Anne Hathaway, Matt Lucas, Rhys Ifans, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen and Alan Rickman, opens May 27 with director James Bobin taking up Burton's mantle.

As of Friday, Alice Through the Looking Glass had a low score of 34 on Metacritic and 29 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, leaving critics unimpressed with the screen adaptation of Lewis Carroll's work (one reviewer put it bluntly: "All frosting, no cake"). To compare, 2010's Alice in Wonderland scored 53 on Metacritic with 52 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

The film has been panned in reviews so far, with critics lamenting the sequel's lack of connection to Lewis Carroll's source material (Alice becomes a ship captain in the film version) with a "candy-shop production design" that can't quite save the story, but instead often runs right over it.

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The Hollywood Reporter's Sheri Linden says Alice is "just as overstuffed a phantasmagoria of CGI and makeup as the 2010 film. Its imagery can be striking or merely distracting, yet rarely transporting. Bypassing child-friendly charm for backstory psychology, its dreamscape is weighted with yadda-yadda-yadda about being true to yourself, honoring family and being loyal to friends." Linden adds that the sequel, while being true to the first film, doesn't quite stay true to its source material. "The story, which has nothing to do with Carroll’s episodic 1871 book beyond its title and a clutch of key characters, plays out as a blenderized mix of standard fantasy action and Burtonesque Gothic-alia."

The New York Times' Stephen Holden writes, "Carroll’s deeply subversive, nonsensical embrace of the absurd and truly strange has been mostly painted over" in the sequel due to its "discontinuity between the movie and its source material," adding that perhaps the best way to enjoy the film is to "surrender to its mad digital excess and be whirled around through time and space in a world of grotesque overabundance."

Time's Stephanie Zacharek says the sequel "feels like a movie made by committee, a picture with no rhyme, no reason and no real reason for existing other than to cash in on its predecessor’s popularity." Echoing other critics' takes that the cast doesn't seem very involved in the film, Zacharek adds that they "all look as if they’re yearning to be elsewhere, perhaps suffering from dyspepsia triggered by the picture’s aggressive candy-shop production design."

The Los Angeles Times' Justin Chang writes, "Alice Through the Looking Glass is a movie for anyone who skimmed a passage of Lewis Carroll and thought, 'This is great, but it could use a bit more Terminator.'" Chang also laments the lack of source material in the sequel, instead calling it "a feast of garishly overwrought, effects-encrusted production design."

The Washington Post's Stephanie Merry writes, "There was clearly a lot of thought put into making the movie look spectacular. ... If only as much care were put into the slipshod story," adding that it's hard to care about any of the several characters introduced, as "wondrous visuals only go so far, in a film that turns out to be lethally dull."

May 29, 2016 4:28 PM MST

Alice Through the Looking Glass
Rating: Four Stars


“Alice Through the Looking Glass” continues the narrative of Alice, Lewis Carroll’s timeless character, as depicted in the 2010 Tim Burton adaptation. This 2016 follow up, directed by James Bobin and written by Linda Woolverton with Burton as producer, is based on Carroll’s novel Through the Looking-Glass. With taut dialogue, an ensemble cast, and an expectation-defying plot, “Through the Looking Glass” successfully manages to surpass its predecessor.

Alice Kingsleigh (Mia Wasikowska) has proven herself more than capable as the captain of her father’s ship, and after a three year voyage, she returns to London. Upon her arrival, Alice discovers that Hamish Ascot (Leo Bill), her almost-fiancé, has assumed ownership over his father’s company, which currently employs Alice. Scorned by her earlier rejection, Hamish explains his plans to take back her ship in exchange for her mother’s home, and offers her a position as a clerk. Distraught, Alice returns to Underland (Wonderland) by stepping through a mirror, or looking glass.

However, all is not well in Wonderland. Her party of friends, the White Rabbit (Michael Sheen), Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), White Queen (Anne Hathaway), Absolem (Alan Rickman), and the Tweedles (Matt Lucas) reveal that the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) has gone, well mad. Madder than usual, that is. After finding the first hat he ever made, Hatter is now convinced that his family, presumed dead after the Jabberwocky attack, is still alive. Alice embarks on a mission to save Hatter’s family, which involves stealing the Chronosphere from Time (Sacha Baron Cohen) in an attempt to travel back in time and change the course of history.

“Through the Looking Glass” resumes a few years after the events of 2010’s “Alice in Wonderland,” and plunges into the story straight away. Alice’s journey into Wonderland happens much earlier than in the original film, and it’s neat to see her step out back into the real world for a brief intermission, before returning to Underland for most of the third act. Set design is gorgeous, both in the real world and Wonderland. The opening sequence of Alice outwitting a fleet of pirates is truly captivating, with realistic waves crashing and cascading. Time’s castle is breathtaking, and the use of CGI feels more to craft a backdrop rather than overpowering with its intricate visuals.

In a pleasant but unusual twist, “Through the Looking Glass” is quite dialogue-driven. While there’s no shortage of action, the film strikes a balance. Conversation drives the story, with action at pretty regular intervals. An ensemble cast helps the talking maintain a steady ebb and flow. Seasoned actors the likes of Andrew Scott (who appears all-too briefly) and Richard Armitage wisp in and out, testament to the talented roster. Helena Bonham Carter reprises her role as the Red Queen, outdoing her stellar performance in the previous entry.

The plot features several unexpected twists, and it’s a bit dark in places. As a fairy tale goes, it’s not quite as intense as “Return to Oz” which featured the notorious heads scene, but has its own moments of briefly bleak sequences. Yet there are still some definitely foreseeable happenings, occasionally stumbling into predictability. While the overwhelmingly gifted cast is a treat, there are times when the story feels too rushed. Scott notably doesn’t get nearly enough screen time, appearing in a dark but humorous scene which calls to mind the aforementioned “Return to Oz” and its commentary on fantasy, reality, and insanity.

Despite its few shortcomings, “Alice Through the Looking Glass” continues the reinvented Alice in Wonderland epic. It’s equally, if not more, enjoyable than the first series entry, aided in no small part by the brilliant cast. What propels it from good to great is a heavy reliance on dialogue rather than pure octane, and the surprising plot elements which subvert traditional fairy tale tropes.

Movie Review – Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016)

May 29, 2016 by Robert Kojder Leave a Comment

Alice Through the Looking Glass, 2016.

Directed by James Bobin.
Starring Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Stephen Fry, Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall, Rhys Ifans, Matt Lucas, Richard Armitage, Andrew Scott, Lindsay Duncan, and Sacha Baron Cohen.

SYNOPSIS:

Alice returns to the whimsical world of Wonderland and travels back in time to save the Mad Hatter.

Alice (Mia Wasikowska) returns to the whimsical world of Underland and travels back in time to save the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) in Disney's ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, an all-new adventure featuring the unforgettable characters from Lewis Carroll's beloved stories.

In an age where Hollywood cannot go more than two years tops without cashing in on a sequel to a smashing box office success, it is absolutely flabbergasting from a business perspective that Alice Through the Looking Glass is just now being released a little over six years after Tim Burton rebooted the iconic characters and story with Alice in Wonderland. That movie made over $1 billion too, begging the question, why was there no immediate follow-up?

Well, after having watched Alice Through the Looking Glass, it seems safe to assume that creatively there wasn’t much of an interesting direction to take things. I realize that has never stopped Hollywood before, but even the most casual of moviegoers will sense that something is terribly off regarding the presentation and narrative of this second modernized CGI Alice in Wonderland feature. There is no spark, no soul, no life, but rather a whole lot of pretty things happening on the screen that wholly fail to resonate on any meaningful level.

Do the special effects team and costume designers deserve credit for making Alice Through the Looking Glass stand out as visually spectacular and pleasing? Absolutely, everything from the purple dress (that also contains a number of other colors and designs embedded on the fabric) Alice wears throughout the film, to Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter get-up, to the conceptual design of time as an actual place, and more, is certainly all fascinating to behold with a great degree of wondrous imagination. The actual visual effects are also beautiful, although after having seen something like The Jungle Book I must admit that the mouth movements of the fantasy inspired creatures and animals, along with their general juxtaposition to real-life actors do not look as fluid. It’s actually quite jarring most of the time, and the only gripe with otherwise fantastic effects.

Unfortunately, it is all a hollow effort considering that again, there isn’t much in the way of characters or a story to care about. There is an attempt to tie all of the subplots together as a central theme regarding the importance of family, which is something that will certainly play well for younger viewers and general families checking out the movie, but it is so ham-fisted by the end of the experience, one is left just feeling as if director James Bobin took one simple idea and stretched it out over two hours of blindingly beautiful colors and computer wizardry.

Alice Through the Looking Glass is also most definitely one of those two-hour movies where you begin to feel every minute. It doesn’t help that seemingly half the movie depicts Alice traveling through time in a Chronosphere, which looks a lot like sailing in a giant hamster ball through an electricity field of many different colors showcasing glimpses of different time periods; it’s well, time travel. It is fun and pretty to look at the first time, but there is so much time traveling going on that eventually viewers will grow tired of the sequences, and at some point even begin to lose grasp of the plot, aside from the very general idea that the Mad Hatter is sad and needs his family saved.

For as soulless as the entire experience plays out however, it cannot be denied that the ensemble cast show up as reliable as ever. Mia Wasikowska continues to make a great Alice regarding both physical features and personality, Johnny Depp is as eccentric and bizarre as you would expect him to be, Helena Bonham Carter is pleasantly nasty as the evil Queen, and Anne Hathaway is fine in her role, but the real awesome addition is Sacha Baron Cohen and his particular style of comedic delivery portraying Time as a person.

The movie itself isn’t offensively terrible to the point where you’ll be raging in the lobby demanding your money back, but it is rather unremarkable, even more so than the film Tim Burton gave us six years ago. Alice Through the Looking Glass is the sequel we didn’t need but had to get at some point considering how bankable the franchise is, and might still be.

Alice (Mia Wasikowska) returns to the whimsical world of Underland to help the Hatter (Johnny Depp) in Disney's ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, an all-new adventure featuring the unforgettable characters from Lewis Carroll's beloved stories.

The question to ask now is what is next, and in a perfect world, I would tell you the big studios in Hollywood would finally ditch family-friendly Alice in Wonderland and put the true twisted nature of the story on screen (preferably with a video game adaptation of Alice: Madness Returns), but realistically this will probably still make a decent amount of money, and Johnny Depp is going to need to offset the alimony money SOMEHOW, so prepare for about five more by 2030.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Alice Through the Looking Glass review – HG Wells meets Hogwarts
2 / 5 stars

Wendy Ide

Sunday 29 May 2016 08.00 BST


It’s hard to think of a movie franchise that is less in tune with the spirit of the source material than Disney’s effects-bludgeoning, action onslaught adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s whimsical Alice stories. This sequel to Tim Burton’s megabucks first film has a new director – James Bobin takes over and Burton produces – but it refers more to Alice’s first big screen outing than it does to anything in Carroll’s books. Despite the fact that Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is now a sea captain who can escape pirate pursuers by stunt piloting a three-masted sailing ship over a sand bank, the forces of patriarchy in Victorian England are still out to oppress her.

As with the last film, Alice escapes to “Underland”, where she finds the Hatter (Johnny Depp, looking as though he fell head first into a Mac counter) in the grip of a morbid depression. To save him, she must steal the chronosphere from Time (Sacha Baron Cohen, responsible for the film’s funniest moments) and travel back to meddle with the past. A blitzkrieg of digital effects and a kind of HG Wells meets Hogwarts aesthetic is not enough to distract from the fact that the storytelling is all smoke and mirrors and very little in the way of heart.

Review: Garish, Lifeless Alice Through the Looking Glass Betrays Its Source Material

Stephanie Zacharek @szacharek

May 27, 2016

Not even Mia Wasikowska, whose presence is soothing by its very nature, can make this craven sequel worth watching.

Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There is one of the trippiest children’s books ever written, a squiggly bit of tomfoolery made by a highly imaginative individual. James Bobin’s Alice Through the Looking Glass—a sequel to Tim Burton’s mad, cluttered 2010 Alice in Wonderland, featuring much of the same cast—feels like a movie made by committee, a picture with no rhyme, no reason and no real reason for existing other than to cash in on its predecessor’s popularity. The actors may as well have been zombified and then airlifted onto the set, they appear to have so little interest in being there. Mia Wasikowska returns as Alice, only in the movie’s vision, it’s not enough for her to simply slip into the looking-glass universe for some wild adventures. The plot has been junked up with a dumb framing device, hinted at in the earlier movie, that makes Alice the captain of her late father’s ship: In the opening sequence, she bravely guides the vessel through pirate-ridden seas. The point, in case you’ve missed it, is that Girls Can Do Anything. Of course they can! Why be so hamfisted about driving it home?

Eventually, Alice does creep through that mirror, at which point the fantasy element kicks in. It’s not much relief: The Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), after reliving a childhood trauma, has taken to his bed. He may be dying—Alice rushes to help, but first must negotiate some time-travel nonsense involving Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Queen, Anne Hathaway’s White Queen and Sacha Baron Cohen as Time himself. All look as if they’re yearning to be elsewhere, perhaps suffering from dyspepsia triggered by the picture’s aggressive candy-shop production design. There’s lots of emoting and lots of rushing around, but very little in the way of emotion or sensible plot mechanics. Not even Wasikowska, whose presence is soothing by its very nature, can make this craven sequel worth watching. How can something so garish not even have a pulse?

Alice Through the Looking Glass Review

By Sandy Schaefer

Alice Through the Looking Glass is more of a shiny, yet hollow, Disney product than meaningful continuation of Alice’s story.

Alice Through the Looking Glass picks up three years after Alice Kinsleigh (Mia Wasikowska) made her second trip to Wonderland, during which time she has traveled to China aboard her late father’s trading ship – and made plans to explore the rest of the world, too. Upon returning home to London, Alice discovers that circumstances have changed with regard to both her employment and her mother Helen’s (Lindsay Duncan) living situation – putting Alice at risk of both losing her ship and winding up stuck behind a desk, working as a clerk for Hamish Ascot (Leo Bill), the man who once proposed to her. However, before she can make any decision on the matter, Alice is contacted by the caterpillar-turned butterfly Absolem (Alan Rickman) and follows him through an enchanted mirror that leads to Wonderland.

There, Alice learns that Hatter (Johnny Depp) has become convinced that his family – who were seemingly killed by the Jabberwocky years ago – is still alive and that Hatter is now rapidly aging, as a result of this “madness”. The White Queen (Anne Hathaway) and the other denizens of Wonderland thus convince Alice to take on a dangerous mission in order to save the Hatter: reach out to Time himself (Sacha Baron Cohen) and use his Chronosphere (a device that allows its user to travel across the Oceans of Time) to go into the past and change Wonderland’s history, saving Hatter’s family from their grisly fate. That is, of course, assuming that Alice doesn’t break the timeline in the process…

Alice Though the Looking Glass is arriving on the scene some six years after director Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland opened in theaters in 2010, on its way to grossing over $1 billion worldwide and ushering in the new era of Disney live-action fairy tale re-imaginings. While the majority of the Alice in Wonderland cast returned for the sequel, Burton only produced Alice Through the Looking Glass – having instead passed the director’s torch over to Disney’s Muppets helmsman James Bobin. Unfortunately, similar to the Bobin-directed Muppets sequel Muppets Most Wanted, the Alice in Wonderland followup comes across as an attempt to keep a lucrative Disney brand going, more than anything else.

The Alice Through the Looking Glass narrative by Linda Woolverton, who also penned Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, picks up with Alice as a young adult woman – and her character arc in the film (as Alice comes to learn that she cannot simply “cheat” her way out of her adult problems in the present) is a worthwhile extension of Alice’s own coming of age journey in the previous Alice installment. Unfortunately, despite another solid performance from Mia Wasikowska, Alice spends most of Through the Looking Glass serving as little more than observer to the (scenery-chewing) antics of Wonderland’s various eccentric citizens – in particular, the Mad Hatter and the Red Queen, whose origins are revealed over the course of a larger storyline that is serviceable, but formulaic and banks too much on over-used time-travel narrative tropes.

Johnny Depp’s Hatter is afforded a backstory here that involves a difficult relationship with his father Zanik Hightopp (Rhys Ifans), but that Through the Looking Glass plot thread is derivative of Depp’s previous collaborations with Burton and the “daddy issues” explored therein. As for the Hatter himself, there’s less emotional nuance to the character here than there was in Alice in Wonderland – to the degree that Depp’s Hatter in general comes off as little more than a live-action, but still two-dimensional, cartoon character. Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Queen, by comparison, gets a more intriguing backstory that paints her in a more sympathetic light (bringing to mind Woolverton’s revisionist approach to another Disney villain in her Maleficent screenplay). However, these emotional insights end up feeling superficial since Carter’s Red Queen is still the same flat antagonist for most of the film – and her relationship with Anne Hathaway’s White Queen is under-developed, enough so that the revelations about the sisters’ shared past have limited dramatic impact.

Sacha Baron Cohen’s Time is another important player in Alice Through the Looking Glass‘ proceedings – and while the bumbling antagonist is more multi-faceted than the literal mustache-twirling villain he could have been, he functions as an obstacle in the movie’s narrative, more than an interesting character in his own right. Meanwhile, Wonderland’s CGI residents (the late Alan Rickman’s Absolem, Michael Sheen’s White Rabbit, Stephen Fry’s Cheshire Cat, and so forth) are more set decorations than characters here, even more than they were in Alice in Wonderland. The disconnect between the humans and Through the Looking Glass‘ digitally-rendered players (and, to a lesser degree, the CGI environments) is all the more apparent here too, following on the heels of Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book: a Disney live-action fairy tale movie that’s more successful at integrating its digital elements (including the film’s CGI supporting characters) with its lead actor(s).
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Wonderland itself is a more pleasantly colored fantasy landscape (with a more even mix of practical sets and digital backdrops) in Through the Looking Glass than it was in Alice in Wonderland. Likewise, Bobin and his collaborators – including director of photography Stuart Dryburgh (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty) – succeed in creating some captivating imagery and spectacle here too, with new locations such as Time’s lair and the (literal) Oceans of Time. However, though Through the Looking Glass‘ brighter color palette allows the movie’s visuals to appear less murky when viewed in 3D than Alice in Wonderland‘s did, the various settings and scenery in Burton’s first installment had more personality by comparison (thanks to the filmmaker’s darkly off-beat touch). Bobin’s Alice sequel also uses 3D more to create an immersive atmosphere than for pop-out effect, though not in a particularly innovative way – so although Through the Looking Glass benefits from being viewed on a big screen, 3D is not really a necessity to get the full viewing experience offered here.

While there are elements of the film that (with additional development) could have potentially elevated it above being an acceptable, but forgettable, sequel, Alice Through the Looking Glass is more of a shiny, yet hollow, Disney product than meaningful continuation of Alice’s story. Through the Looking Glass entered development before the critically-acclaimed Disney live-action fairy tale films Cinderella and The Jungle Book and it shows, as the Alice in Wonderland followup has a mindset more in line with the corporate-mandated franchise fare that Disney was producing in the early 2010s (see Prince of Persia, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, etc.) than its more creatively-inspired recent tentpoles. Through the Looking Glass unfolds more as a book-end to Alice in Wonderland than a bridge to a third Alice movie, but time itself – not Time himself – and the box office will truly determine whether or not Miss Kingsleigh gets to head back to Wonderland again in the future.

Alice Through the Looking Glass is now playing in U.S. theaters nationwide. It is 113 minutes long and is Rated PG for fantasy action/peril and some language.

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