Movie Review: 'Alice Through The Looking Glass'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- In 2010, stylistic director Tim Burton turned the classic 1865 Lewis Carroll children's story, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, into Alice in Wonderland, a visually inventive gothic fantasy, full of bracing nonsensicalness.
It was a passably bewitching entertainment that audiences turned into a blockbuster of a family adventure fantasy, an eye-popping, twisty-perspective, CGI-enhanced, 3-D surrealist extravaganza.
Burton is one of the producers of the inevitable follow-up, Alice Through the Looking Glass, loosely based on the 1871 Carroll story, Through the Looking Glass. It joins a subgenre of adaptations of Carroll's upbeat, absurdist material: there have been several dozen of them down through the years on screens large and small.
But the directorial reins Burton has turned over to James Bobin, the British director of "The Muppets" (2011) and "Muppets Most Wanted" (2014). Still, Burton's fingerprints certainly remain on the sequel.
The screenwriter, Linda Woolverton, also returns with another female-empowerment script, as twentysomething Alice politely rebels against the constraints of Victorian society, but the head-scratching narrative is far less interested in exploring character than skipping around rapidly while momentarily showcasing the film's visual trimmings: the sets, costumes, makeup, and CGI illusions.
Eye candy there's plenty of.
But that and a dime, as they say.
Hiding its narrative and dramatic flaws beneath a flashy veneer, the film offers special effects on parade. But we never stop perceiving them as just that – effects – and rather than pulling us into the film's spell, they distance us even further from it than we already are.
Most of the original cast return for the sequel. Most prominently, Mia Wasikowska is back in the title role; Johnny Depp – singly billed above the title and phoning it in -- returns as The Had Hatter; Anne Hathaway is back as the White Queen; and Helena Bonham Carter remains as the Red Queen.
But the ensemble cast also boasts the talents and voices of Sacha Baron Cohen, doing a (director) Werner Herzog impression as the literally-mustache-twirling villain, Time; the late Alan Rickman, to whom the film is dedicated, as Absolem the Caterpillar; Martin Sheen as the White Rabbit; Toby Jones as Time's manservant; Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat; Rhys Ifans as the Mad Hatter's father; and Timothy Spall as the Bloodhound.
And it's dream logic rather than common sense that rules the day.
Aussie Wasikowska is once again both sweet and strong as Alice Kingsleigh, who returns to the whimsical world of Wonderland after sailing the high seas for three years as the captain on her father's ship, The Wonder, while being pursued by pirates.
Upon returning to London from Asia, Alice feels betrayed both by her mother, who has mortgaged the family estate, and her fiance, who plans to foreclose either the house or the ship.
She is then diagnosed with hysteria and finds herself strapped to a bed in an insane asylum.
But she finds a magical looking glass, which allows her to travel back through time to the Wonderland realm – actually it's "Underland" -- which she yearns to return to, and where she can try to help or even save The Mad Hatter, who is depressed and even madder than usual, by changing the past and the future.
When Alice wakes up in Wonderland, she must travel through a mysterious new world and race against time to retrieve a magical scepter, called a chronosphere, a device that everybody wants.
Now maybe she can stop the evil lord of time, played by Cohen as a half-clockwork, half-human, omnipotent demigod, before he can turn the clock forward and turn Wonderland into a barren, lifeless old world.
On her journey, Alice has the help of a few new friends as she attempts to uncover a manipulative plot involving the chronosphere to return the now-banished Queen of Hearts to the throne.
A visual spectacle that's actually dreadfully short of compelling plot and severely lacking in emotional involvement, this superficially stimulating fantasy is nothing if not hectic.
So we'll visualize 2 stars out of 4. Alice Through the Looking Glass invites looking without feeling: all it will make you feel is tired.
