Alice Through the Looking Glass

Alice Through the Looking Glass

Starring Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Sacha Baron Cohen, Helena Bonham Carter

Directed by James Bobin

The Story:
Years after returning from Wonderland, Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is now a ship captain, helming the boat once owned by her father.  When she returns home she finds her father's company has been taken over by her ex-fiance, who wants her to sign over the rights of the ship to him.  Furious she storms off, where she finds Absolem (voiced by the late Alan Rickman), who is now a butterfly, and takes her to Wonderland through a mirror.

Upon arriving, she discovers that the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) is gravely ill, because he feels his family is still alive, although they were supposedly killed years ago by the Jabberwocky.  She feels its impossible, which makes the Mad Hatter even more ill, until she learns from the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) that she can indeed go back in time and fix things by taking the Chronosphere (a device that could take a person through time) from Time himself (Sacha Baron Cohen).  She manages to take the Chronosphere and go back in time, but learns that she cannot change the past, but she can learn from it.

The Synopsis:
Tim Burton brought "Alice to Wonderland" to glorious life back in 2010, earning over three hundred million dollars worldwide.  His take on the beloved Lewis Carroll tale was filled with his trademark fingerprints: exaggerated, over-the-top effects/sets, his (now ex) wife Helena Bonham Carter, and his mancrush Johnny Depp as his normal eccentric self.

With "Through the Looking Glass," Burton has moved to the Producer spot, giving directing duties to James Bobin (who's known for "The Muppets" and "Muppets Most Wanted"), and he seemed a bit too hard to try to be like Burton with the effects, set pieces and costumes, but Tim Burton he ain't.  It adds a sense of dis-ingenuousness to the production, like something made just for the sake of making money, and not to tell a full, rich story.

When it was released, it did less than half the amount the original made, and was labeled as the first big bomb of the summer.  There could be a few reasons why this occurred:
-"Alice" was released in March, way before the summer blockbusters arrived, and only had "Brooklyn's Finest" to compete with; "Looking Glass" came out in late May, crunched between "Civil War" and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2," as well as being released the same weekend as the much-anticipated "X-Men: Apocalypse"
-the week the film was released, Johnny Depp and his wife Amber Herd divorced, with Herd claiming Depp beat her; for someone who's the main star of a film being released that weekend, it didn't bode well for the entire picture
-for anyone looking for a true-to-book adaptation, "Looking Glass" is far from it; there's no Time in the novel, and the Mad Hatter isn't even mentioned

There's more reasons, but those alone were three strikes against the film even before it came out.  After it was released, there was no doubt as to why it was such a critically massacred movie.  Besides it being a pandering product with the Burton-wannabe effects, the story itself pretty much makes "Alice in Wonderland" rather pointless.  Here, we see there's a bigger connection between the Mad Hatter, White Queen and the Red Queen, which should've come to light in "Alice," but seemed to be totally glossed over.  Plus, with an invention as powerful as the Chronosphere - which could transport the user through time - you would expect the Red Queen to have been hunting for it for awhile, but here it seems like an afterthought to her.

Plus there's the characters.  Besides Alice, everyone else pretty much plays second-fiddle or worse here as she plays Nancy Drew through history.  The Mad Hatter is hardly an afterthought here, and that's more than I could say for the White Queen, White Rabbit, the Tweedles, the Dormouse, the March Hare, Bayard and the Cheshire Cat, who combined share a total of about twenty lines between them.  For characters who had such vivid life and excitement in the original to all be confined to the background was a travesty.  The Red Queen performed a bit better here, and Time was a decent character (the least annoying character Sacha Baron Cohen has ever played), but all-in-all, it was a wasted effort on pretty much everyone's part.

Ultimately, there was a few small gems sparkled throughout the mud that was the movie, including the different concepts of Time (is time an enemy?  a friend?  omnipotent?), the value of family, the desire to go back and change that which seems wrong, and the playful banter between Depp and Cohen dropping several time-related one-liners ("time is on my side," "time's flying") that seem improvised and brought about some chuckles.

So you got some good you can take from a film that's an otherwise unmediated disaster, but it's still a disaster nonetheless.

The Summary:
Wanting to re-capture the fantasy and love "Alice in Wonderland" delivered, ultimately "Through the Looking Glass" proves time is up for this film series.

The Score: B