Alice Through The Looking Glass Review

A lot has changed in the six years since March 2010. Tablets, once considered a niche item that Apple was foolish to try and get in on, are now a cornerstone of the technology market. Dwayne Johnson has gone from the star of middling family movies to one of the biggest action movie stars  of our generation. And in that same span of time Alice In Wonderland has basically been forgotten, with its main source of fame being that it inspired Disney to greenlight other live-action remakes of classic animated Disney films that surpassed Alice in both critical reception and box office. It also doesn't help that since the first Alice movie Johnny Depp has gone from being a box office powerhouse to a drug-riddled wife abuser.

With all of those factors in play, Alice Through The Looking Glass was released this weekend to dismal reviews and equally disastrous box office. Even the international markets that turned the first Alice movie into a $690 million box office juggernaut have abandoned the newest Wonderland adventure. Considering how middling Alice Through The Looking Glass is, it's no shocker to see it being flat-out rejected by moviegoers across the globe.  There's just not much here on an emotional, visual or entertaining (for good or bad reasons) level, it's just a dull romp through an overabundance of CGI.

Since we last saw Alice (Mia Wasikowska), she's been leading a ship named The Wonder to far-away lands like China. When she returns home, she finds her mother in deep financial trouble and the only way to save her is by selling the ship to the man whose marriage proposal she refused in Alice In Wonderland. Then she goes off into Wonderland, excuse me, Underland, for a "whimsical" adventure involving time travel and Time itself played by Sacha Baron Cohen that has very little bearing on the tribulations Alice is experiencing in the real world. There's a shoehorned-in motif of "family", with Alice experiencing difficulties with her mother and The Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) wanting to find his previously-thought-to-be-deceased relatives, but it's all just window dressing for a cacophony of noise, yelling and bright colors.

At least Wonderland (I am not calling it Underland, thank you very much), has more color in its visual appearance this time around compared to its grey and dreary look in its predecessor. That's about the only positive thing to say about the mien of Alice Through The Looking Glass, which takes a cue from George Lucas approach to the Star Wars prequel in make every frame "dense" with imagery. Each and every shot in Wonderland is stuffed to the brim with CGI characters to an exceedingly distracting degree as if director James Bobin was worried the audience would lose interest mighty quick in this entire enterprise if there weren't shiny colors on-screen in every second of the films running time.

Perhaps viewers like myself would be more invested in the motion picture if the inhabitants of this fantastical realm were at all developed enough for one to care about their plight. The movie reintroduces the likes of The White Rabbit and The Cheshire Cat in a manner akin to when Han & Chewie first showed up in The Force Awakens only neither the first Alice film or this new adventure gives one a reason to be entertained or engaged by these interpretations of Lewis Caroll's creations. They all come off as over-loud and obnoxious creations that no sane human being would want to spend 113 minutes (yes, Alice Through The Looking Glass really runs that long, putting it approximately 11 minutes longer than the runtime of Casablanca) with.

Mia Wasikowska, a fine actor whose been good elsewhere in stuff like the underrated Crimson Peak, seems to be dazed for much of the movie as she stumbles from one color-laden domain to the next. Other well-known individuals (like Anne Hathaway, who I forgot was even in the first Alice In Wonderland until she first showed up in this movie) seem to be similarly lost on-screen, while Depp seems to be sleepwalking in his portrayal of the Mad Hatter, a character that, in both Alice features, comes off like Depp doing a shoddy Jack Sparrow impersonation devoid of that swashbuckling characters charm. Then again, there's not much charm, or much entertainment at all, to be found in Alice Through The Looking Glass, so chalk this one up to him simply attempting to work with what he's got.