Alice’s Underland gets awfully ordinary
Print Edition
“ALICE Through the Looking Glass ,” like its predecessor, owes very little to Lewis Carroll.
Screenwriter Linda Woolverton has again disposed of the source material in favor of something more linear — a story about Alice (Mia Wasikowska) looking for Hatter’s (Johnny Depp) family.
Director James Bobin’s film trudges on through the lushly designed world answering questions we never asked, like, “What was the Mad Hatter’s childhood like?” And, “why does the Red Queen have such a large head?” In other words, it’s an Underland origin story.
We meet Alice some years after the first film faced again with the prospect of losing her independence. Alice climbs through a mirror and is transported back to Underland. Her old friends have been waiting for her to fix another problem: The Mad Hatter.
The nightmarish Hatter, who has developed a more pronounced (and annoying) lisp, is wallowing in life-threatening depression because he’s found an object that makes him believe his family is alive. This was not something that seemed to afflict Hatter in the first film, but maybe he’s just really good at compartmentalizing.
Alice decides be a noble friend and take on Time to get to the bottom of what really happened on the day when the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) unleashed her Jabberwocky on their village. Time, you should know, is part clock, part man (Sacha Baron Cohen) and sounds a lot like Werner Herzog.
Time is dependent on a larger than life clock that’s powered by another device which also functions as a time travel machine. That’s what Alice steals to careen back through time to try to correct the original sins of Underland — despite learning of the possibly catastrophic consequences of her actions.
While it might sound intriguing on paper, on the screen it’s less than enchanting and the plot gets less and less compelling as it goes on.
Excitement and wonder are fairly hard to conjure up when your Mad Hatter is consumed with daddy issues, your protagonist is nonchalant about everything, and the oddities of this world are suddenly getting scientific explanations that really only show how awfully ordinary everything once was.
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