To a degree, everything in the first 40 minutes of Alice Through the Looking Glass is inessential, getting Alice back to Underland and off on a quest that pulls in every familiar face from the previous installment as if checking off boxes on a shopping list. Instead, Linda Woolverton’s rather workmanlike script takes priority, hijacking the film to tell what amounts to a stock origin story for not just Depp’s Hatter but Anne Hathaway’s aloof White Queen, Helena Bonham Carter’s irascible Red Queen, and even (to a lesser degree) the rest of the crew, including younger versions of Tweedledum, Tweedledee (Matt Lucas playing both roles), and the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry). Unlike Burton, Bobin isn’t secure enough in his eye for distinctive visuals to let them exclusively run the show. It’s in this threadbare plot point – Let’s go back! To the beginning! – that the cracks in Alice Through the Looking Glass‘ cheerily blithe facade become apparent. Almost immediately, though, she’s accosted by a familiar blue butterfly and, stepping through a mirror, finds herself back in Underland.
Infuriated, she storms off, lamenting that she might have to “sign over the Wonder and give up the impossible” – two things she vowed never to do.
The opener, a nautical chase that feels like a fever dream both in terms of big-eyed, on-the-nose dialogue (“You know my stance on that word,” Alice says, sternly reprimanding her first mate for calling a maneuever “impossible”) and souped-up CGI imagery, sets the tone for what’s to come.īack in England, Alice finds that her snobbish old suitor Hamish (Leo Bill, appropriately snivelling) has contrived a new dilemma with which to box her in, forcing a financial decision between her father’s ship, subtly named the Wonder, and her mother’s home. Directed by James Bobin, whose strengths are in comedy (he helmed both of the terrifically funny, new Muppets movies), the new film echoes the original’s “return to Wonderland” set-up by reuniting with its heroine (a charming Mia Wasikowska) as she intrepidly sails the high seas as the captain of her father’s ship, evading adversaries with Desperaux-esque daring and a pinch of peculiarity.
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