Review of Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016) by Ginak — 05 Jun 2016

I’d like to comment on two things, which any adult going to see this film needs to know about – the audience and the film itself. The “adults” played with their iPhones, ate mountains of popcorn, and comforted wailing infants.

Meanwhile, the children sat quietly and watched the movie. For the rest of us, the movie was colorful but full of anachronisms. Alice the captain of a cargo ship? Yikes! An episode where Alice is almost treated in a hospital for “female hysteria”? Meaningless to anyone who is not a Victorian scholar.

I also watched the trailer again, whose background music was Grace Slick singing “White Rabbit.” False advertising. Alice walked through a mirror – no “Drink Me, Eat Me” in this film. Maybe nowadays this is called a “mashup” – but to me it was just a movie that made little sense on any level.

But given all this craziness – the badly behaved adults in the audience and the nutty script, I didn’t hate this film. For most of it, there was just a lot of colorful running around, kind of like a cinematic roller coaster, and if you paid attention and stayed sane until the end of the film when the search for the Hatter’s family kicks in, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter actually provided some real emotion and story.