Alice Through the Looking Glass

Alice Through the Looking Glass

As soon as I got back from “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” I took my eyeballs out of my head and washed them in a sink. I could have just cleaned the fronts, leaving them in, but I didn’t want to risk it. They’re still in there, soaking. I’m touch typing this review. Wish me luck.

“Alice Through the Looking Glass” is a sequel to Tim Burton’s 2010 film “Alice in Wonderland,” in which Mia Wasikowska’s Alice travels into the past to prevent the Jabberwocky from roasting the parents of Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter. Burton isn’t involved with this one but then again, he wasn’t really involved with the last one either.

Yes, he directed it; yes, it made a billion dollars; yes, people all over the world love it because they saw it when they were children; but no, “Alice in Wonderland” had no poetry or grit or soul even by its own standards and its character design was weak (and this movie’s is weaker), and its direction was weak (and this one’s is weaker), and its lighting was weak (and this one’s is weaker), and its comic timing was weak (and this one’s is weaker). It may as well have been made by a “Tim Burton” fan whose only storytelling experience had been directing TV ads for candy.

New director James Bobin (“Muppets Most Wanted”) and returning screenwriter Linda Woolverton (“Beauty and the Beast”) have made a film that continues the Burton film’s tradition of excellence, which is to say “professional,” in the sense that people were paid for it. All of the major characters from the first movie are back, including the Hatter and the feuding Red Queen (Helena Bonham-Carter) and White Queen (Anne Hathaway).

Carter has her usual grand old time, but both she and Hathaway seem sidelined through most of the movie, and just when they finally get a halfway decent scene together, the movie is about to end and their previously established rivalry is about to be turned into mush for no discernible reason.

Alice’s feminist credentials are satisfied in easy ways: by having her do physically brave things (like outrun three pirate ships as captain during a bizarrely unexciting pre-credits sequence), and by letting her make “brave” decisions whose outcomes are never in doubt. The star’s ability to project old-movie pluck and innocence are sorely tested here. She’s in every scene of the movie, yet it’s still a nothing part.

Depp makes even less impact. His Hatter is tangential to the action even though it revolves around his happiness he minces-anxious-fey throughout and there are a couple of decent CGI-driven action sequences but no memorable characters or lines except for one performance by Sacha Baron Cohen as Time that might be called memorable but only because it’s essentially Lumiere from “Beauty & The Beast” dressed up like Werner Herzog.

The film is dedicated to Alan Rickman, who provided the voice of blue butterfly (and former blue caterpillar) Absolem; I miss his marvelous honeyed baritone voiceover work it suggests in just a few brief sentences the bedtime story this movie might have been. The design is at once hideous and bland, like a rough draft of a CGI-driven blockbuster that filmmakers would show to studio bosses only when begging for more time and money to create something releasable; there is not a single effect in the movie that stirs the mind, a single composition that stirs the eye, or a single line worth remembering; Danny Elfman’s score ladles Magic and Wonder onto every scene, to convince you that what’s onscreen doesn’t look like a Shrek film as painted by an amateur who idolizes Leroy Neiman.

The scenes where Time contemplates a sea of pocket watches dangling in space, each representing a living or dead soul, should be staggeringly beautiful and scary and moving just because the idea itself is magnificent; what’s onscreen looks like an edgy Super Bowl ad intended to restart the pocket watch industry by appealing to ironic millennials. The sky, the watches, the walkway on which Time stands, Time’s costume, Alice standing behind him it all looks neither real nor fake, primitive nor sophisticated.

And Alice surfing the minute and second hands of an immense stone clock face (time itself) could have had talismanic power were it not so clearly an assembly of immense yet oddly weightless moving pieces and visual cliches such as the sudden-zoom-out-to-a-God’s-eye-view shot that nearly every CGI-driven blockbuster feels obligated to do even though it hasn’t awed anyone since “The Matrix.”

Every now and then people ask me if movies ever offend me.

They do. They offend me because they are fashionably cynical. They offend me because their racial or sexual politics are glib and crude or because they flatter the fantasies of their target audience rather than challenging them. They offend me because they swagger around with “edgy” violence that isn’t abstractly beautiful, mythologically rich, or psychologically complex, but merely opportunistic and cruel.

But the most offensive kind of movie is one that spends an insane amount of money and yet seems to be thinking about nothing but money. You give it, they take it. And you get back nothing for your ticket except the promise of magic and wonder. The film keeps telling you this in your ear, and flashing it up onscreen in big block letters: MAGIC AND WONDER. MAGIC AND WONDER. But there is no magic, no wonder only junk rehashed from a movie that was itself a rehashing of Lewis Carroll, tricked out with physically unpersuasive characters and landscapes and “action scenes,” with blockbuster “journey movie” tropes affixed to every set-piece as blatantly as Post-It Notes.

How many small- or medium-sized films went unfunded or unmade because the entire Hollywood studio apparatus has been dedicated to cranking out enervated fantasies that are machine tooled for maximal repeatability and exploitability under the pretense of being magical and wonderful?

Watch Alice Through the Looking Glass For Free On Gomovies.