Alice Through the Looking Glass Review: A $300 Million Fetch Quest Through Other People’s Childhoods

Alice Through the Looking Glass is a sequel that spends 113 minutes explaining a hat. Disney’s follow-up to Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice in Wonderland brings back the tea party, the digital fog and most of the same cast, and gives them a fetch quest through other people’s childhoods. James Bobin directs from a script by Linda Woolverton. The film opened May 27, 2016 through Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, and it does not work.

Trailer, via Disney Australia & New Zealand.

The Looking Glass Sends Alice Back to Underland

Alice Kingsleigh has spent three years sailing the high seas, following her father’s footsteps. She returns to London from China to learn that her ex-fiancé, Hamish Ascot, has taken over his late father’s company and wants her to sign over her father’s ship in exchange for her family home.

That is a real conflict. A woman fighting for her father’s legacy against a man who wants to trade it for a house. Then Alice follows a butterfly she recognizes as Absolem, the caterpillar she knew before his transformation, and steps through a mirror back into Underland. The London thread vanishes.

The Mad Hatter Insists His Family Is Alive

In Underland, the White Queen, the White Rabbit, the Tweedles, the Dormouse, the March Hare, the Bloodhound and the Cheshire Cat greet Alice with bad news. The Mad Hatter is acting madder than usual because his family is gone. Alice tries to console him. He insists they are still alive.

The White Queen decides the only way to restore his health is to send Alice to consult Time and persuade him to save the Hatter’s family in the past. She warns Alice that history will be destroyed if a person’s past and present selves meet. That rule is the only piece of machinery here that generates real stakes, and the film uses it once.

Sacha Baron Cohen Plays Time

Time is a god-like human and clockwork hybrid who rules over all of time in Wonderland using the Chronosphere, kept in a castle of eternity. Sacha Baron Cohen plays him. Bobin has said he wanted to avoid a “straight-up bad guy,” calling that “a bit dull,” and noted the role already existed in the form of the Red Queen.

He wanted a “twit” instead, and said “there’s no one better at playing the confident idiot trope than Sacha Baron Cohen.” The reasoning is sound. The execution is not. Time tells Alice that altering the past is impossible. She steals the Chronosphere anyway, and the film never explains why a man who guards all of time cannot simply take it back.

The Red Queen’s Crowning and a Stolen Tart

The exiled Red Queen orders Time to pursue Alice. Alice lands at the Red Queen’s crowning, where a younger Mad Hatter mocks her when the crown will not fit her abnormal head. Her father deems her unfit to rule. She throws a tantrum that swells her head, and she vows revenge on the Hatter.

That sequence is the film’s best idea: the Red Queen’s cruelty has an origin, and it is humiliation. Alice then learns of an event in both queens’ pasts that causes friction between the sisters and travels back again, hoping to change the Red Queen’s character. The young White Queen steals a tart from her mother and leaves crumbs under her sister’s bed.

Small, mean, human cruelty. For one scene the film remembers that this world runs on petty logic rather than spectacle. Then it buries the insight under another chase, another clock, another set piece.

Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp and the Returning Cast

Mia Wasikowska returns as Alice Kingsleigh. Johnny Depp returns as Tarrant Hightopp, the Mad Hatter, with Louis Ashbourne Serkis as the young Tarrant. Anne Hathaway is Mirana, the White Queen, with Amelia Crouch as the young Mirana. Helena Bonham Carter is Iracebeth, the Red Queen, with Leilah de Meza as the young Iracebeth.

Alan Rickman voices Absolem in his final film role. Stephen Fry is the Cheshire Cat, Michael Sheen the White Rabbit, Timothy Spall the Bloodhound, Barbara Windsor the Dormouse, Meera Syal Nobody. Rhys Ifans plays Zanik Hightopp, the Hatter’s father, with Simone Kirby as his mother Tyva and Eve Hedderwick Turner as his sister Paloo.

The live-action additions are thinner. Leo Bill is Hamish Ascot, now Lord Ascot after his father’s death. Lindsay Duncan plays Helen Kingsleigh, Alice’s mother. Geraldine James is Lady Ascot. Ed Speleers is James Harcourt, an Ascot employee. Andrew Scott plays Dr. Addison Bennett, a cruel psychiatric doctor.

Two Sisters, Two Wounds

The film’s structure hinges on a parallel the source material lays out plainly: two sisters, two childhood wounds, one grudge that outlives them. The table below sets the two against each other.

The asymmetry is the point. Mirana’s childhood theft costs her nothing. Iracebeth’s humiliation costs her a crown, and the film never reckons with that imbalance. It shows it, then moves on.

A $300 Million Disappointment

Alice Through the Looking Glass premiered May 10, 2016 at the Odeon Leicester Square in London. It grossed $300 million against a $170 million budget, losing the studio an estimated $70 million. Reviews were mixed to negative, praising the visuals and criticizing the story.

The visuals are not nothing. The Castle of Eternity, the Chronosphere, the clockwork ocean of time — these are built with money and skill. A film cannot be carried by production design when its plot is a fetch quest through other people’s backstories.

The tagline promises “It’s time for a little madness.” What the film delivers is a lot of machinery and very little madness.

The problem is not that Alice Through the Looking Glass is strange. It is that the film is not strange enough, not coherent enough, and not willing to sit still with the one idea that works. The Red Queen’s grudge drives the entire story, and the film treats it as a plot point to be resolved rather than a wound to be understood. The casting is fine. The craft is fine. The score is not.

3.4/10 (Metacritic 34/100).

Alice Through the Looking Glass · box office flop · Disney · Johnny Depp · movie review · Sacha Baron Cohen