Other returning Brits deliver fine voice work as well: Matt Lucas, as the rhyming Tweedles, Stephen Fry (Cheshire Cat), Michael Sheen (White Rabbit), Timothy Spall ( Bayard the bloodhound), Barbara Windsor (Dormouse) and Paul Whitehouse (March Hare).īut center stage, or a good part of it, belongs to the psychodrama between the warring queens, played again by Anne Hathaway, in frosty pallor, and Helena Bonham Carter, a magnificent amalgam of digitally enhanced malevolence and wounded inner child. Leading Alice away from home and back to Underland is the film’s fleeting glimpse of ethereal playfulness, the former caterpillar Absolem, now a blue butterfly voiced with plummy richness by the late Alan Rickman (to whom the picture is dedicated). Its other key ingredients: a Wicked-reminiscent look at the roots of sibling rivalry and unpersuasive reminders that there’s no place like home. The story, which has nothing to do with Carroll’s episodic 1871 book beyond its title and a clutch of key characters, plays out as a blenderized mix of standard fantasy action and Burtonesque Gothic-alia. But Alice’s mission feels as manufactured as the story’s whatsits and doodads, as Bobin struggles to infuse make-believe with emotion (something he managed winningly within the comic realm of The Muppets). At stake is the very survival of Alice’s friend the Mad Hatter (Depp), who’s dying of depression and regret over his missing family, the specifics of their fate a tormenting mystery for him.ĭepp is convincingly vulnerable and forlorn, all while maintaining the Hatter’s otherworldly eccentricity, and Wasikowska has the requisite grit. Woolverton, whose revisionist reading of a femme-centric fairy tale had a potent intensity in Maleficent, here puts her heroine on a time-traveling quest to rewrite history.
Alice through the looking glass review ign movie#
But though Alice’s beloved ship is rather pointedly named The Wonder, the movie offers only a paucity of the same. Colleen Atwood’s splendid jewel-bright outfits reflect her travels through China and emphasize her worldliness against the conformity of London society. But in case we haven’t appreciated the depths of her fortitude and accomplishment, Linda Woolverton’s screenplay informs us that the word “impossible” is anathema to Alice. Putting aside the matter of her colonialist exploits, Wasikowska’s Alice Kingsleigh is a convention-defying, self-actualized Victorian female.
Back in London but eager to return to the frothy fray, she learns she’s facing foreclosure on her vessel thanks to a bit of desperate deal-making by her mother (Lindsay Duncan) with the spiteful upper-class twit (Leo Bill) whose marriage proposal Alice rejected. Alice, determined to save her friend from coping with grief and regarding the rules of the space-time continuum, steals the time-traveling chronosphere from Time ( Sacha Baron Cohen) and goes into Underland’s past where she learns the relationship between the Red Queen Iracebeth ( Helena Bonham Carter) and the White Queen Mirana ( Anne Hathaway).Disney Rules Hollywood's Fairy-Tale War as Other Studios Bite the Poisoned AppleĪs Alice Through the Looking Glass kicks off its message-laden adventure, the title character (Mia Wasikowska) is a brave and capable ship’s captain. There she learns that the Mad Hatter ( Johnny Depp) has fallen into a deep depression because no one but him believes that his family is still alive. Refusing to accept this fate, she runs off during a party and into a room that just so happens to have a magical mirror that transports her back to Underland. There are some interesting ideas and concepts sprinkled throughout, but they never coalesce into something that’s worth your time.Īlice ( Mia Wasikowska) has been sailing the seas as a ship captain, but when she comes home, she learns that her command has been sold and she’s doomed to work as a desk clerk. And yet for a film about the urgency of time, Looking Glass drags at a remarkable rate. Bobin’s film labors under the presumption that we desperately needed to know how the Queen of Hearts got her gigantic noggin or what happened to the Mad Hatter’s family. This is how we get Alice Through the Looking Glass, James Bobin’s time-traveling sequel to Tim Burton’s 2010 film Alice in Wonderland. Unless a giant boat sinks at the end, a film that grosses over a billion worldwide is pretty much guaranteed to get a sequel whether the audience demand is there for one or not.
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