Review | Film review: Alice Through the Looking Glass – misguided story changes make for a boring sequel
Second-rate adaptation takes all the fun out of Lewis Carroll’s classic and falls way short of Burton’s first Alice film
2/5 stars
This sequel squanders the dark psychedelic capital of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, and also insults the intelligence of its source, Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. How a director could turn one of literature’s most imaginative works into such a humdrum affair is a mystery, but that’s just what James Bobin has managed to do. Everything about this film is decidedly second-rate; amazingly, it even gets boring.
Amid the mass of undisciplined special effects in search of a story, Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is brought back to Underland (that’s Wonderland, for those who haven’t seen the first film) to save her friend the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) from manic depression. To do this, Alice must steal a time machine from Time (Sacha Baron Cohen) and travel back into the past to save the Hatter’s family from disaster. The time-travel plot is as hackneyed as it sounds, and the effects, while massive, are nothing new.
