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. (Cribbing from the Transformers franchise is rarely a good look, yet here we are.) 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. 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). They're all worried about the depressed Hatter, and the White Queen dispatches Alice to travel back into the past to save his family. The question is 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?įortunately, 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). 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).
When we first meet back up with our twentysomething heroine, she's in command of a ship pursued by pirates. To the rescue, eventually, comes Alice Kinsleigh (Mia Wasikowska). 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. The Mad Hatter, as in the last instalment, is played by Johnny Depp with a shock of orange hair, clown makeup and pupils dilated to psilocybic proportions. (Yet paradoxically, the plot is still often hard to follow.) 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.
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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. The problem with Alice is its lack of narrative imagination. 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. 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. 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.
Taking Carroll's anything-goes psychedelic setting and painting it over with a drab time-travel plot and thoroughly beige origin stories for otherwise colourful characters, this lacklustre go-round is a mercenary backward step for Disney's live-action excavations of its animated back catalogue, which enjoyed a mighty leap forward only a few weeks ago with Jon Favreau's The Jungle Book. "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.
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