A Few Thoughts on Alice Through the Looking Glass

I saw this film with a friend the other night, and while I certainly wouldn’t call it a good movie, it’s also a somewhat frustrating one, because it contains a handful of strong points – elements that, if pursued more deftly, might have resulted in a much better film.  That’s what I want to look at today, things that I feel went both right and wrong.  (Note:  I’m sticking strictly with the movie here.  The current allegations against Johnny Depp are another matter.)  A few spoilers.

General complaints first.  It feels disjointed to me that the movie’s look is one of wonder and whimsy while the overall storyline is bogged down by family drama.  Season 1 of Once Upon a Timesold the Mad Hatter as a tragic (yet dark) figure, but try as Alice Through the Looking Glass might, it really can’t pull off the same.  All the sad eyes feel forced, the familial fallings-out feel too tritely-written, and the prevailing tone of the whole thing just feels out of place.  (Also, speaking of Once Upon a Time, the Queen of Hearts’s childhood origin story makes Regina’s villainous motivation seem almost rational.)  To couple the father-son, sister-sister angst with the technical visuals and bonkers silliness of Wonderland doesn’t work for me.

As with the first film, the less you know about the book, the more sense the story makes, but I don’t begrudge it that.  After all, it was sold from the beginning as a revisionist version of Alice’s adventures.  Besides, I’m not so attached to the book that I mind all the changes, and it’s not like the book would give too much of a cohesive story arc for a film to work with, anyway.  While some of the newly-imagined plot, like Hatter angst, doesn’t interest me, others, like Hero!Alice, are pretty neat.  On the latter front, Alice’s transformation into a BAMF is written a little too obviously at time, but I like the general idea of it, and some of it comes off really well.  The opening scene, wherein Alice (now traveling the world in a ship left to her by her late father) escapes a band of pirates due to her knowledge of the sea, creative thinking, and sheer nerve, makes me very happy, and that combination of smarts and bravery serves her well when she gets back to Wonderland.

It’s interesting to me that every scene set in our world is basically, “Boo, Victorian misogyny!  Go feminism!”  It’s not surprising that Alice would receive pushback from her way of life there, and that it would be hard for her to combat something she can’t solve like a riddle or fight with a sword; I was definitely a little impressed when, mid-film, a Victorian doctor declares her to suffering from “female hysteria.”  That said, this storyline is also written too on-the-nose at times, and I don’t think the threads between Alice’s struggle for independence in England and her heroic journey in Wonderland are drawn quite clearly enough.  Again, I feel a real disconnect between the different parts of the film.  There are good pieces that don’t seem to blend organically into the whole.

My last check in the plus column is some of the stuff surrounding the personification of Time.  All the time jokes (a la “Why is it you wait for no man?”) feel very Lewis Carroll, and while it doesn’t quite make sense for Time to have a clock in his chest, since the use of timepieces to mark its passage is a box that we humans stuff time into, I do love the rooms filled with hanging pocket watches in his castle, each one representing a different person making their gradual way toward ticking their last – a cool idea, and a really gorgeous image.  I also enjoy the general theme of the time-travel plot, the ultimate idea of learning from the past rather than changing it.