Disney's sequel to 2010's "Alice in Wonderland," "Alice Through the Looking Glass," as with its predecessor, has very little in common with Lewis Carroll's classic books. There's an alternate world occupied by some creatures with partially-shared names, including a female (a woman here instead of a child) named Alice falling down a rabbit hole before and, now, going through a mirror. The similarities mostly end there. Not only is this Disney series evidently not really inspired by its literary source, it's antithetical to it. Where there was charm and wit in the books, there is none here. A place where characters were less important than what they represented is turned into a void where what's represented is only characters. Episodic and cleverly-constructed nonsense is replaced with hackneyed journey plotting. Enjoyment unsaddled by sentiment and a moral, here, becomes a cloying morality tale about the importance of family with an obnoxious musical score that's always keeping the audience attuned to what they're supposed to be feeling. This is one of the most vile big-budget, major-studio productions I've seen in some time.
Even the CGI animation merely looks expensive rather than imaginative or impressive. The shots of Time chasing after Alice in the "cronosphere" (yeah, it's pretty stupid) look especially dreadful--static green-screen stagings that the illusion of movement by animated vortexes can't conceal. The "cronosphere" time machine itself looks like a gyroscopic mix between the prop from the 1960 "The Time Machine" with the flying capability of the "Back to the Future" DeLorean and a toilet. The clockwork stuff doesn't even look as good as what one could find in the first two "Hellboy" movies. Even the mirror motif is junk--a vestigial leftover from Carroll's original story.
More so than even in the last movie, Alice is turned into a corporate marketing tool to profit from piggybacking on socially-progressive issues. Never mind, I guess, that this Alice is a colonialist--a ship captain for a Victorian-age trading company just back from opening up China for the imperial West. I've never thought much of the claim made by others that Carroll's books have a secret message regarding drugs, but Disney has done quite an inept job of things to tie Alice to the Opium trade.
And who in their right mind wants to know the backstories of Wonderland (I mean, "Underland," seeing that Wonderland is a "real" place in these movies instead of a dream) creatures. I don't care about the family situation of Johnny Depp's most-irritating character, the Hatter. There's no wonder behind Disney's association of evil with physical deformity, as with the big-headed Queen of Hearts this time. Nobody reads the Alice books and thinks the case of the stolen tarts is in need of more drama. Throughout the picture, I was rooting for Alice to fail and that all of Underland would die. Ironically, the movie is too long, as well.
These most recent Alice movies aren't only a disgrace to the legacy of Carroll's books, they're a disgrace to the company's founder, Walt Disney. I'm not the biggest fan of his 1951 cartoon version, either, but it's far better than these two, and, at least, Walt had respect for the source. Walt and company made some interesting short films loosely inspired by the books, too, including Mickey Mouse in "Thru the Mirror" (1936) and "Alice's Wonderland" (1923), which led to Disney's flagship series of Alice comedies, which combined live action with animation long before his namesake conglomerate made abominations from such technical innovations. The only silver lining here is that the box-office success of the 2010 movie turned out to be a fluke--one likely based largely on the novelty of 3D and Depp's fleeting star power--before he Flutterwacken'ed it away--being associated with the Disney brand. With the same dynamics waning after six years, this one bombed. It was about time.
Even the CGI animation merely looks expensive rather than imaginative or impressive. The shots of Time chasing after Alice in the "cronosphere" (yeah, it's pretty stupid) look especially dreadful--static green-screen stagings that the illusion of movement by animated vortexes can't conceal. The "cronosphere" time machine itself looks like a gyroscopic mix between the prop from the 1960 "The Time Machine" with the flying capability of the "Back to the Future" DeLorean and a toilet. The clockwork stuff doesn't even look as good as what one could find in the first two "Hellboy" movies. Even the mirror motif is junk--a vestigial leftover from Carroll's original story.
More so than even in the last movie, Alice is turned into a corporate marketing tool to profit from piggybacking on socially-progressive issues. Never mind, I guess, that this Alice is a colonialist--a ship captain for a Victorian-age trading company just back from opening up China for the imperial West. I've never thought much of the claim made by others that Carroll's books have a secret message regarding drugs, but Disney has done quite an inept job of things to tie Alice to the Opium trade.
And who in their right mind wants to know the backstories of Wonderland (I mean, "Underland," seeing that Wonderland is a "real" place in these movies instead of a dream) creatures. I don't care about the family situation of Johnny Depp's most-irritating character, the Hatter. There's no wonder behind Disney's association of evil with physical deformity, as with the big-headed Queen of Hearts this time. Nobody reads the Alice books and thinks the case of the stolen tarts is in need of more drama. Throughout the picture, I was rooting for Alice to fail and that all of Underland would die. Ironically, the movie is too long, as well.
These most recent Alice movies aren't only a disgrace to the legacy of Carroll's books, they're a disgrace to the company's founder, Walt Disney. I'm not the biggest fan of his 1951 cartoon version, either, but it's far better than these two, and, at least, Walt had respect for the source. Walt and company made some interesting short films loosely inspired by the books, too, including Mickey Mouse in "Thru the Mirror" (1936) and "Alice's Wonderland" (1923), which led to Disney's flagship series of Alice comedies, which combined live action with animation long before his namesake conglomerate made abominations from such technical innovations. The only silver lining here is that the box-office success of the 2010 movie turned out to be a fluke--one likely based largely on the novelty of 3D and Depp's fleeting star power--before he Flutterwacken'ed it away--being associated with the Disney brand. With the same dynamics waning after six years, this one bombed. It was about time.