I liked it. But I guess you could say I was the target audience as I liked the first one as well.

It's not particularly good on characterization (especially for Alice) but I thought the film moved along nicely and I was entertained. Like how time was represented and what not.

I also enjoyed it, probably more than the first film. B

It's nicely paced, which really keeps the present entertainment consistent throughout. All the actors also have a stronger screen presence this time around (aside from Cheshire, which was disappointing) I thought, and Sacha Baron Cohen was a surprisingly nice addition (he's very hit or miss to me most of the time).

It has the ring of a minority opinion despite a billion-dollar worldwide total, but I highly enjoy Tim Burton's 2010 version of Alice in Wonderland. It fuses part of the hallucinatory and mischievous spirit which drew the Jefferson Airplane/Tom Wolfe generation to Lewis Carroll with a standard-but-rousing slay-the-dragon story, and it significantly buoyed the career of Australian up-and-comer Mia Wasikowska, who has since become one of my favorite actresses. Six years later comes a belated sequel with Burton serving as producer, replaced in the directorial chair by James Bobin, co-creator of Ali G and Flight of the Conchords and director of the last two live-action Muppet movies.

There is a fair amount to praise in this second chapter: Wasikowska is fine form as Alice, elegant and resourceful and free of any contractual-obligation contempt for the role she reprises, and new cast member Sacha Baron Cohen is tremendous as a personification of time, finding simultaneous notes of cruelty, majesty, and whimsy within the part. Absurd sight gags are plentiful and almost always hilarious, and venerable costume designer Colleen Atwood, of course, treats the eyes to a vast assortment of colors, shapes, and textures, drawing influence from China for Alice's dramatic central outfit with its splashily adorned mandarin collar. Undermining the experience, however, is a poorly conceived screenplay. Through sheer motion and volume, it tries and fails to turn banal origin-story and pop-psychology tangents—the Mad Hatter's dysfunctional family history, the childhood betrayal which left the Queen of Hearts contemptuous and vengeful—into a cohesive and propulsive plot. Supercharging the inconsequential in this case only highlights the deficiency. The sequel also badly under-utilizes such iconic Wonderland denizens as the Cheshire Cat and the Caterpillar, the latter's too-few honeyed-baritone barbs provided by the late Alan Rickman in his final role.

B-

Oh, and the interlude where Alice is in a mental ward and TV's Moriarty tries to inject her is super odd. With its gesture toward the barbarism of 19th-century mental-health treatment, it feels loaded and sinister in a way the movie does not and cannot wrestle with as it sprints along. Not sure why Alice had to leave Wonderland for those five minutes.

Alice Through The Looking Glass must have enchanted me. At least, that's the only way I can explain enjoying it so much when it got such terrible reviews. Or perhaps our culture still just has difficulty accepting a strong and smart female lead character in a Hollywood fantasy. Personally I loved the psychedelic steampunk design and I found the time travel story very engaging and dream logical. Unboundedly better than Alice In Wonderland. An ethereal *A*.

The mom should've let them eat that last fucking tart. God

Ha, ha. True.

One more negative comment: the whole prior interaction between the Queen of Hearts and the Hatter (him laughing at her too-small crown at the coronation and becoming a target of her revenge) registers as total fan fiction. There was zero sense of this history in the prior movie.

And a positive one: I adore Time's castle, particularly the room of pocket watches symbolizing peoples' lifespans.

Alice Through the Looking Glass unfortunately magnifies not only the strengths of its predecessor, but also the weaknesses. Surprisingly, this film looks even more marvelous under the directorial eye of James Bobin than the previous one did under Tim Burton. Bobin plays up the color and visual splendor in ways that Burton didn't, and the film looks and sounds absolutely splendid in a theatrical setting (especially IMAX, where it makes optimal use of its 1.85:1 aspect ratio). However, the biggest problem with the previous film was the manner in which its script tried to force tired order on inherently chaotic source material, and the sequel does an even worse job on this front. Do we really need a backstory to explain why the Queen of Hearts and Mad Hatter are as they are? Neither character was particularly interesting before, and neither one feels any more worthy of sympathy after what Alice learns via time travel (particularly the Queen of Hearts; the origin of her big head feels like a nastier and much more juvenile version of the explanatory prologue of Frozen). Alice herself remains as vaguely developed as before; despite a game performance from Mia Wasikowska, there's no reason to care about this character. It's hard to care about the film's dramatic stakes when none of the characters feel interesting or sympathetic, and the nonsensical plot developments that pop up here and there feel difficult to swallow given the script's attempt to tell a coherent story in a fundamentally incoherent setting. With the critical drubbing and awful box office performance it has posted, Alice Through the Looking Glass is destined to join the same Disney hall of shame that high-profile bombs like John Carter, The Lone Ranger, and Tomorrowland already occupy. However, whereas those films each have qualities that make me believe that the scorn is disproportionate to the final product, Alice earns whatever present and future audience contempt it gets thanks to its disappointingly straightforward and unimaginative approach to what should be bizarre and imaginative material.

C-

Just to reiterate myself one more time, I truly believe what would have made this film more creatively successful and perhaps even more monetarily viable (or at least easier to sell) is a story which moves the characters forward. The choice to dig into these musty past corners and obsess over, "This character is this way because of x and y and z..." falls flat. "Why does the evil queen have a big head?" as a primary plot point is surely a testament to an origin-story-fixated era gone awry. The sequel ends up feeling lower stakes than its predecessor.

I wasn't a big fan of the original but this feels like a hot mess. I have no idea why we needed to see Alice as a sailor, did they even have women sailors in that era? That part really doesn't impress and has no value/tension in her going to Wonderland. Enter Wonderland, its still great visually but this "legendary" friendship between Alice and Hatter seems flat (wasn't explored that well in original movie as well). But fine we agree Alice is a heroine here and she needs something to save. We go to Time done wonderfully by Baron Cohen. Then we enter the time travel which is the only time I thought visuals could have been more mystifying and that is a big part of the movie. The whole back-stories of hatter and Evil Queen are unable to connect and there is no reason to know these characters. I think these things were added to make it look like a time travel movie and maybe show the dragon once more. The whole rescue later the ending lacks the energy it should plus the parting scene with Hatter was unnecessary because we haven't seen these characters in the movie together (maybe for 3 scenes but they feel very short).

Wasikowska is again great here, her movie choices have been great so far. Depp is utterly wasted here so is Hathaway. HBC is good but not as good as the last time. SBC came out the best of the lot in the movie.

The visuals and costumes are there but the story is poorer than the last time.

4/10

I felt that very distracting as well. Why would her mother agree to put her in a mental institution even if she is unconscious?

Pretty much the definition of 'meh.' It's not offensively terrible and is watchable enough, but the plot is tired and very forgettable and there are almost no dramatic stakes to speak of. It also, quite surprisingly, wastes almost its entire ensemble in a way that the first film did not. Mia Wasikowska is good but Anne Hathaway and Johnny Depp's roles in this film could almost be registered as extended cameos. It feels like a cash grab sequel more than anything else as there's no organic reason plotwise this movie should exist. It's gorgeous visually though. C

*1/2 / ***** (D-)

I liked the first one. This one is all kinds of bad.

This movie is super dull so far.

I don't love the first, but it's relatively enjoyable. This sequel is pretty much a dung heap. The plot is stupid and pointless with no sense of stakes or narrative drive. The CGI is as gorgeous as ever, but gone is the darkness the first film had. A List actors try to elevate this to the best of their ability, but to no avail. At least the Pink song is good.

D-