‘Alice’ disappoints
Visually stunning ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ falters due to poor script
Why is a raven like a writing desk? That famous Alice riddle was never quite answered. But the relevant riddle at hand concerns an exchange between her and the Cheshire Cat:
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” she asks.
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” CC responds. “I don’t much care where,” she says. “Then it doesn't much matter which way you go,” he replies.
That seems to be the thinking behind “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” the film sequel to Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” — wholly unrelated to Lewis Carroll’s own sequel to same.
It involves too much incongruous reality-grounding, starting with the opening — admittedly exciting — sequence in which Alice (Mia Wasikowska) as an intrepid sea captain steers her ship through reef-riddled straits. She then returns to London to face the chinless aristocrat she jilted, who now runs the shipping firm that wants to ditch her. Yadda yadda — before she finally goes through the mirror back to Wonderland, where she finds old pal Hatter (Johnny Depp) more sad than mad about his slain family of yore.
What to do? Hop into the chronosphere — a gyroscopic time-travel module — and fix the past by stopping the evil Lord of Time (Sacha Baron Cohen) from turning the clock forward. The plot gets curiouser and curiouser with his plot to restore stumpy, hard-to-please Queen of Hearts (Helena Bonham Carter) to her lost throne.
Alice’s 3-D-IMAX flights, time and wave surfing over oceans, are as nifty as the insides of Lord Time’s giant clock cathedral. Mr. Cohen is a hoot with his inconvenient wing pads, bossing the timid little tin-can creatures who combine and bulk up on command into the ferocious
Jabberwock beast.
Cheshire Cat, the Tweedles, the March Hare (Thackery Earwicket), White Rabbit (Nivens McTwisp) and Dormouse — all those excellent creations are fun to see again, but they’re not so fresh this time, and Alice looks so much older.
Director James Bobin attempts to channel Tim Burton’s bravura style but should have beaten screenwriter Linda Woolverton soundly about the head and shoulders with the collected works of Mr. Carroll, in punishment for her pathetic script. The author is rolling over in his grave: no chess motif, no portmanteau wordplay, Alice’s manufactured mission infused with bathetic melodrama. Ms. Woolverton gives both Hatter and the Red Queen a backstoryto-the-future a la Darth Vader’s, making them sympathetically Dickensian instead of Carrollian, while turning Alice into a Comi-con feminist superhero instead of a bright, no-nonsense little girl.
Mr. Depp, with diastema and lisp, is always entertaining (“Is it true you wait for no man?” he asks Time) and convincingly forlorn, but largely wasted. He and Alice both get lost in the dizzying computer-generated imagery that hurls them, and us, from one frantic set piece to the next.
So much fine motion-capture technology in service of so little. It’s final proof (as if more were needed) that the best visual tricks are futile without a good story to enhance.
Post-Gazette film critic emeritus Barry Paris: parispg48@aol.com.