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As soon as I returned home from seeing “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” I removed my eyeballs from my head and cleaned them in a sink of warm water. I could have left them in place and only cleaned the fronts, but I didn’t want to take any chances and risk damaging them. They’re still in there, soaking wet, of course. This review is being written by touch-typing. I’m hoping for the best.
It is a sequel to Tim Burton’s 2010 film “Alice in Wonderland,” in which Mia Wasikowska’s Alice travels into the past in order to prevent the Jabberwockey (Johnny Depp) from roasting the parents of the Mad Hatter (Matt Damon). There will be no involvement from Burton in this one. But, contrary to popular belief, Burton was not “involved” in the original film in the way that you might expect him to have been. While he directed it and it grossed approximately 647 billion dollars worldwide, the film lacked poetry, grit, and heart. It was a hollow experience. It even had poor character design, direction, lighting, and comic timing—areas in which Burton had previously appeared to be able to amuse himself—which was particularly disappointing. It could just as easily have been made by a Tim Burton fan whose primary storytelling experience consisted in directing television commercials for candy.
Replaced director James Bobin (“Muppets Most Wanted”) and returning screenwriter Linda Woolverton (“Beauty and the Beast”) have created a film that “continues the Burton film’s tradition of quality,” and is “Professional, in that the people who worked on it were compensated.” All of the major characters from the first film are back, including the Hatter and the feuding Red Queen (Helena Bonham-Carter) and White Queen (Kate Winslet) from the first film (Anne Hathaway). Carter appears to be having a wonderful time, but the Red Queen and the White Queen are largely absent from the film for the majority of it. When they do finally get a halfway decent scene together, the film is about to end and their previously established rivalry is about to be turned to mush for no discernible reason, which is a shame because the film is otherwise excellent.
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Having Alice do physically brave things (such as outrun three pirate ships as a captain in a bizarrely unexciting pre-credits sequence) and making “brave” decisions whose outcomes are never in doubt is the easiest way to satisfy Alice’s feminist credentials in the film. Throughout the film, the star’s ability to project old-fashioned pluck and innocence is put to the test. Despite the fact that she appears in every scene of the film, she plays a minor role. Depp makes even less of an impression. His Hatter, despite the fact that the story revolves around his happiness, is tangential to the action and has only two modes: mincing-anxious-fey and vaguely furious. There are a couple of decent CGI-driven action sequences, but no memorable characters or lines, and only one performance, by Sacha Baron Cohen as Time, that could be described as memorable—and even that performance is essentially a modified Lumiere the Candlestick outfit with Werner Herzog’s accent added on top of that. “Absolem” is a blue butterfly (and former blue caterpillar) who appears in the film and is voiced by Alan Rickman, who is honored in the film. My heart aches for his wonderful honeyed baritone voice, which, in a few brief sentences, conjures up images of a bedtime story that might have been.
Alice Through The Looking Glass Quiz
As in the original, the design is both hideous and uninteresting, like a rough cut of a CGI-driven blockbuster that filmmakers would show to studio executives only to be told that they needed more time and money to make something that could be released. There isn’t a single effect or composition in the film that piques the interest of the viewer, and there isn’t a single line that sticks in the mind. In order to convince you that what you’re seeing onscreen isn’t a Shrek film painted by an amateur who idolizes Leroy Neiman, Danny Elfman’s score ladles Magic and Wonder over every scene.
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Because the concept itself is magnificent, the scenes in which Time contemplates a sea of pocket watches dangling in space, each representing a living or dead soul, should be staggeringly beautiful, terrifying, and moving. What’s onscreen appears to be an edgy Super Bowl ad intended to revive the pocket watch industry by appealing to ironic millennials, according to the footage. All of it appears to be neither real nor fake, neither primitive nor sophisticated, including the sky, the watches, the walkway on which Time stands, Time’s costume, and Alice standing behind him. A scene in which Alice rides the minute and second hands of an enormous stone clock face (which represents time itself) could have had talismanic significance if it hadn’t been a jumble of massive yet strangely weightless moving pieces and visual cliches—such as the sudden zoom-out to a God’s-eye view, which nearly every CGI-driven blockbuster feels obligated to do despite the fact that it hasn’t awed anyone since the original “The
About the quiz
People occasionally inquire as to whether or not I have ever been offended by a film. They do, without a doubt. They irritate me because their worldview is cynical in the current fashion. In my opinion, they offend me either because their racial or sexual politics are glib and crude, or because they flatter rather than challenge the fantasies that their target audience has about themselves. Infuriating to me is the way they swagger about trafficking in “edgy” violence that is neither abstractly beautiful nor mythologically rich nor psychologically complex, but rather is simply opportunistic and cruel.
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Nonetheless, the most offensive type of film is one that spends a significant amount of money while appearing to have nothing else on its mind than money. You give it to them, and they take it. And all you get in return is assurances that you are witnessing something magical and wonderful. When you close your eyes, you can hear the words MAGIC AND WONDER being repeated in your head and flashed on the screen in large block letters. THERE IS MAGIC AND WONDER. No magic or wonder is found here; instead we get recycled garbage from a film that was itself a rehash of Lewis Carroll, tricked out with physically unpersuasive characters and landscapes, as well as “action scenes,” with blockbuster “journey movie” tropes affixed to every set-piece as blatantly as Post-It Notes.
The entire Hollywood studio apparatus has devoted itself to churning out listless fantasies that are machine-tooled for maximum repeatability and exploitability while claiming to be magical and wonderful. How many small- or medium-sized films have never received funding or been released as a result?
This is not a work of art. It’s a piece of con artistry.
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