alice through the looking glass film review

Whereas 2010’s Alice in Wonderland slotted Carroll’s characters into the roles of a generic hero’s journey, Through the Looking Glass has more pared-down concerns.

It makes the kiddie-pandering humor around the personification of Time ( Sacha Baron Cohen) pratfalling about much, much stranger. There is much solemn posturing and dramatic shouting, and Hathaway even does a classic Dark Thousand-Yard Stare Off to the Side over its memory. To whit, a tart-stealing incident which is the focal point of a sunnily absurd trial in the Alice in Wonderland book is here “reimagined” as the origin of all the enmity between the White Queen, Mirana of Marmoreal ( Anne Hathaway), and the Red Queen, Iracebeth of Crims ( Helena Bonham Carter), and is presented with the attendant deathly seriousness. Look no further than this if you want to figure out why most kids would much rather play Minecraft than go to a theater. Through the Looking Glass, a sequel to Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice in Wonderland movie, continues its predecessor’s determination to shackle Wonderland’s whimsy to backstories and “realistic” (read those quotation marks as sarcastically as you can) psychology. Regardless, pretty much any given classic video game platformer hews truer to the spirit of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books than any of the myriad film and television adaptations, what with their assemblages of nonsense animal characters and blissfully superfluous plots whose contrivances bear no killjoy strain of logic. There’s some confusion over whether the mushroom which Alice eats to change size in Alice in Wonderland inspired Shigeru Miyamoto to come up with the similarly size-changing mushroom power-ups in the original Super Mario Brothers. I mean, at least with a video game speedrun on YouTube, you get to bear witness to some actual skill. It’s cliche to compare weightless, CG-heavy cinematic action to watching someone play a video game, but I don’t think that’s fair. Alice even has to hotfoot it over a winding shaft, the same as Mario must do in that level. I was primed for this by the fact that the Chronosphere is housed in a clockwork castle which looks ripped off wholesale from the Tick Tock Clock course from Super Mario 64. “Oh, so it shrinks and enlarges as is convenient. Alice ( Mia Wasikowska) drops the little ball and it suddenly grows so that she can step inside and use it to travel through time.

The central plot mechanism of Alice Through the Looking Glass is an actual mechanism, a doodad of whirling steampunk metal and glowy CGI called the Chronosphere.

Alice through the looking glass film review