The plot this time around finds Alice (Mia Wasikowska) once again returning to Wonderland after discovering that her disapproving mother (Lindsay Duncan) and her unctuous ex-fiancé, Hamish (Leo Bill) have essentially sold her out during her latest voyage to explore China (as in the first film, Alice displays her unwillingness to bow to social convention by eschewing a traditional Victorian gown in favor of an imperial Chinese dress she brought back from her voyage, thus offending both polite sensibilities in terms of dress codes and reminding everyone at all times that she is pursing an occupation then associated exclusively with men). Instead of going down a rabbit hole, she steps through a mirror, and again finds that things in Wonderland are distressed. The problem is that her old friend the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) has become convinced that his deceased family is still alive, something that no one else around him believes. When Alice also fails to believe him, he sinks into a stupor from which everyone is concerned he will not emerge. The only option is for Alice to go back in time to save the Hatter’s family, a ploy that requires her stealing a glowing time-travel thing-a-ma-jig from Time itself, which is personified by Sacha Baron Cohen with wild mutton chops, bright blue contact lenses, enormous shoulder pads, and a voice that is eerily similar to Christoph Waltz’s.

After that, it’s off to the races, as Alice flies through different past time periods with Time chasing after her. Her goal is to save the Hatter’s family, but she unwittingly stumbles into the origins of the feud between Mirana, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), and Iracebeth, the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), who has been deposed after her defeat at the end of the last film and is still seething. Alice also learns about the Hatter’s childhood and his strained relationship with his father (Rhys Ifans), which adds a few new wrinkles of pathos to Depp’s bizarre concoction of a character. While Alice in Wonderland was a fantastical metaphor for female empowerment, Through the Looking Glass seems more concerned with the wounds of the past and how they fester and inflect everything about our present. Families are a mess here, both in the “real world” and in Wonderland, with parents consistently underappreciating, betraying, and/or misunderstanding their children.

The film also functions as a prequel of sorts, explaining why certain characters are the way they are and letting us glimpse how long-standing feuds were started, although the fundamentally nonsensical nature of Lewis Carroll’s source books and the movies themselves work against this. Do we really want to know that the Hatter is mad because he has daddy issues? Do we really want to know that the Red Queen began her obsession with lopping off heads because she felt unfairly usurped by an angelic younger sister who is secretly a liar?

The filmmakers are betting that we do, but unfortunately there is so much going on visually and narratively that any meaningful character development or emotional investment feels beside the point. Director James Bobin, who started on television in the mid-2000s with cult fare like Sacha Baron Cohen’s Da Ali G Show and Flight of the Conchords and graduated to feature films with The Muppets (2011) and Muppets Most Wanted (2014), does his best to emulate the look and feel of Burton’s film, but he is also clearly anxious to make his work stand out. Certain moments in the film, particularly when Alice is time-travelling through a dimension that looks like a massive ocean, feel like they were designed to double as theme park rides, and the result is wearying, rather than exhilarating. The fact that some of the effects look cartoonish doesn’t help either, as it makes the film seem simultaneously extravagant and cheap.

Once again scripted by Linda Woolverton (The Lion King), Through the Looking Glass also lacks the robust characterological arc that fueled Burton’s film, where we watched Alice self-actualize through her adventures in the nonsensical world down the rabbit hole. This seems to have compelled the filmmakers to amp up everything else, much to the film’s detriment. One wouldn’t think that the overburdened, heavily CG’ed mis-en-scene of Burton’s film couldn’t be surpassed in terms of sheer candy-colored enormity, but that is precisely what Bobin seems to be going for. Everything in Through the Looking Glass is turned to 11, so much so that it quickly wears you out, rather than revving you up. There are some imaginative moments and enough clever visual twists on familiar concepts to keep it from sinking completely, but too much of it blurs together in its strained bid to wow you.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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