The further you fall down this rabbit hole the quicker you want to initiate the evacuation slide
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| ©BuenaVista Pictures |
Disney is having a banner 2016. In fact, three of the top four highest grossing films of 2016 currently belong to the house of Disney. After ‘Zootopia’, ‘The Jungle Book’, and ‘Captain America: Civil War’, all of which are praiseworthy in this critic’s opinion, comes their latest offering, ‘Alice Through The Looking Glass’. Maybe the rule of three applies this time, because Disney’s fourth offering is simply not up to par with its predecessors. ‘Alice Through The Looking Glass’ is the sequel to Tim Burton’s 2010 film ‘Alice in Wonderland’. The latter grossed over a billion dollars worldwide, which automatically triggered franchise offspring. The original cast is back in action including Johnny Depp (Mad Hatter), Anne Hathaway (Mirana/White Queen) Mia Wasikowska (Alice) and the vitriolic Helena Bonham Carter (Iracebeth/Red Queen).
‘Alice Through The Looking Glass’ does not ducktail off of its sibling, it simply expects that you have already visited Wonderland and familiarized yourself with the characters. The film opens as Alice is captaining her late father’s ship and escaping a close encounter with pirates off the Straits of Malacca in 1874. Hopefully young audiences will not remember that women in Britain did not earn the right to vote until 1928 let alone captain maritime expeditions in the late nineteenth century. If that remark seems too literal of an approach to the film, and perhaps it is, it is only one of many practical elements that ‘Alice Through The Looking Glass’ ask its audience to suspend at the door. Accepting the multitude of fanciful tangents is the only way to appreciate this film, practicality will get you nothing. Alice returns to London only to discover that during her absence at sea her mother placed a lien on their house and she will not be receiving any additional financing for exploring missions. Right when “reality” seems too daunting for Alice the butterfly Absolem, voiced by the late Alan Rickman, appears to offer her an escape route through the looking glass and back to Wonderland.
Upon her arrival in Wonderland, Alice discovers that the Mad Hatter is ill. Hatter is convinced that his family is alive and was never previously destroyed by the Red Queen’s Jabberwocky. His grief of not knowing how to locate or reunite with his family seems to be causing him fatal illness so Alice sets out to find them. The only way for her to know of their previous whereabouts is to travel to see Time himself, played by Sacha Baron Cohen. Time is a custodian of a precious orb known as the chronosphere, which manages the present and the past all at once. Alice has to steal this chronosphere in order to teleport herself back into the past to understand the whereabouts of Hatter’s family. Alice visits several key moments of the past in order to reassemble the chronology of the Hatter family as well as that of the two queens, Iracebeth and Mirana. If all of this seems incredibly convoluted that’s because it is. The film moves in multiple directions simultaneously and hopes that you keep up.
The final scenes of ‘Through The Looking Glass’ try to inspire messages of using time wisely and the importance of familial relationships but ultimately it does not succeed. The amount of globbed on VFX is overbearing at times, though the print did look sharp in 3D. During the last exchange between Time and Alice, Sacha Baron Cohen says “Don’t ever come back here Alice.” Let that serve as a warning to Disney to retire the Alice franchise for a while.
