Review: Alice Through the Looking Glass
"You can't just make things how you want them to be," one character remarks in Alice Through the Looking Glass, a sequel which refuses to resemble anything but an inevitable effort to capitalise on Tim Burton's surprisingly profitable Alice in Wonderland. Burton serves as producer here, handing over the directorial reins to James Bobin, himself no stranger to creatures great and small having directed The Muppets and The Muppets Most Wanted. The contractually obligated cast is once again bewigged, be-painted, and plunked amidst a phantasmagoric CGI landscape, but oh to turn back time and prevent this movie from ever happening!
The film begins on the stormy seas, where Alice (Mia Wasikowska) captains her father's ship into safety with her bravery and her belief that "the only way to achieve the impossible is to believe it is possible." Once back ashore, she learns that her former fiancee Hamish Ascot (Leo Bill) has taken over his father's company and has made a deal with Alice's mother (Lindsay Duncan) for Alice to sell her father's vessel in exchange for keeping their family home. Alice, intent on keeping her father's memory alive and adamant on embarking on further adventures, is furious with her mother for brokering the deal. Her fury immediately dissipates into curiosity when, during a party held on Hamish's family estate, she spots the blue butterfly Absolem (voiced by the late Alan Rickman, to whom this travesty is dedicated), and follows him through a looking glass which deposits her back in Wonderland.
She's delighted to see all her friends - the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), the White Rabbit (voiced by Michael Sheen), the Tweedles (Matt Lucas), Bayard (voiced by Timothy Spall), Dormouse (voiced by Barbara Windsor), and the Cheshire Cat (voiced by Stephen Fry) - but they're concerned about the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), who believes his missing family is still alive and is literally dying of the lingering regret concerning his fractured relationship with his father (Rhys Ifans). In order to save him, Alice must steal the Chronospere, a magical orb that allows its user to travel back in time. However, Alice must deal with Time himself (Sacha Baron Cohen), an intermittently German-accented grim reaper surrounded by mechanical minions and enamoured with the Red Queen (the ever-fabulous Helena Bonham Carter), who means to have the Chronosphere herself in order to rule the past, present and future.
The concept of Time itself is an intriguing one - how one can never really change the past and how one can never truly escape time - but it is trapped in a movie suffocatingly lacquered with flatness. With the exception of Bonham Carter and - to a small degree - Cohen, all of the actors go through their paces and do their best to resemble something sentient. The film is essentially Alice playing tour guide to various characters' origin stories, but the tales spark no interest and the sisterly feud between the White and Red Queens is straight out of the same playbook that the Broadway musical Wicked, Oz the Great and Powerful, and the recent The Huntsman: Winter's War plundered. One can't really fault the technical team, all of whom contribute solid work. Colleen Atwood's costumes are as lavish as ever, Dan Hennah's production design is psychedelically exuberant - both are well-showcased by Stuart Dryburgh's cinematography. Yet nothing coalesces into anything remotely transportive, enchanting or meaningful.
Alice Through the Looking Glass
Directed by: James Bobin
Written by: Linda Woolverton; based on the books by Lewis Carroll
Starring: Johnny Depp, Mia Wasikowska, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway, Sacha Baron Cohen, Rhys Ifans, Matt Lucas, Lindsay Duncan, Leo Bill, Geraldine James, Andrew Scott, Richard Armitage, Ed Speleers, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Michael Sheen, Stephen Fry, Barbara Windsor, Matt Vogel, Paul Whitehouse
