Saw Alice Through the Looking Glass, the low-stakes, low-motivation sequel to the 2010 original that made a lot of money but no one seems to have liked (I thought it was ok). Through the Looking Glass has even less connective tissue to its source material than the original film… and that’s saying a lot. After all, that first movie borrowed from its own sequel to bring in the jabberwock so it could give us a Lord of the Rings style war sequence.
So the new movie goes off and does its own thing. Now a sea captain, Alice travels through the looking glass and learns that the Mad Hatter is super sad and only she can brighten his day… by stealing a time machine from Time (played by Sasha Baron Cohen) and risking the fate of the time/space continuum which will crash down upon Wonderland using Time Cop logic (if you encounter your past self, that’s it for reality).
So this is a semi-elaborate time travel movie about going back and trying to fix the past… and also about fathers and sons and sisters (The Red and White Queen). The movie seems to think we were so enamored of these characters that we want their complicated backstories. Why is the Red Queen so mean? Why is the Hatter so mad? You will learn.
I guess none of this is terrible, but it doesn’t feel very exciting or compelling either. It’s kind of an interesting use of time travel and the time as a flat circle paradigm (now known as a “Hold the Door!” style time travel, I suppose). In that sense, it’s kind of an interesting movie and it kind of looks good and has a certain level of imagination. I suppose. Johnny Depp gets to dress crazy and put on a wig… that’s fun, right? RIGHT?!!?!
But if you can tell I’ve got kind of mild disinterest in the film, you’d be right. It doesn’t do anything so egregiously wrong as to avoid it but it also doesn’t suggest you should run out and see it, either. It’s a low-priority and low-stakes film that has been dumped to theaters six years after the original inexplicably made over a billion dollars. This one will not, by the look of things.
Score: 72