Alice goes through a magical looking glass (a mirror) that takes her back to Underland where she finds the Mad Hatter isn’t himself and he believes that his family wasn’t killed by the Jabberwocky.  She makes a journey to the castle of Time (Sacha Baron Cohen)  to borrow (steal) a chronometer (time travel device) from Time’s clock so she can time travel into Mad Hatter’s past to save his family before time runs out for Underland.

 

ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS isn’t as good as ALICE IN WONDERLAND.  Alice goes through the same lessons as the first movie and male society still looks down on her.  She seems to be the most boring character in the cast where the characters in Underland (including Time and the Mad Hatter) are more interesting than Alice.  You learn more about the pasts of the mad Hatter, the White Queen, and the Red Queen.   The movie is a very pretty movie to look at with a good music score and good character development for the White Queen and Red Queen and the Mad Hatter and Time, but I wish they put more work into providing better motivation for Alice and making her a more interesting character.  The Cheshire Cat is very underused in this movie like many of the returning characters have very little to do in this sequel.   Scriptwriter Linda Woolverton delivers a script that isn’t as good or as enjoyable as ALICE IN WONDERLAND.   It is currently underperforming at the box office and the screenplay doesn’t help deliver an experience that will have people wanting to see in theaters instead of waiting to buy or rent it on digital. Blu-ray, or DVD.   I wish they could use a time machine to go back to undo this sequel or at least have a better screenplay to film than the movie they ended up with.

 

SPECIAL FEATURES:

The extras do deliver excellent bonus content.

 

BEHIND THE LOOKING GLASS is a great making-of featurette that looks at the origins of the sequel book, how director James Bobin looked back at Tim Burton’s movie and used it as a way to expand and explore the universe set up by Tim, casting Sacha Baron Cohen as Time, and the production design.  This fetaurette has plenty of behind-the-scenes footage, film clips, and interviews with cast and crew in an 8 ½ minute time frame

A STITCH IN TIME: COSTUMING WONDERLAND- a look at the costumes with costume designer colleen Atwood

CHARACTERS OF UNDERLAND- all about the characters of the sequel

TIME ON…- Sacha Baron Cohen is hilariously in character as Time as he says Lewis Carroll’s book is rubbish and talks about the movie while making time a pompous twit.

Two Scene Peelers (ALICE GOES THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, ALICE GOES THROUGH TIME’S CASTLE) looking at the blue screen production footage to rough CGI animation to the final scene

Music video for JUST LIKE FIRE by PINK which draws more inspiration from the sequel novel than the actual novel does

BEHIND THE MUSIC VIDEO offers a good three minute look at making the JUST LIKE FIRE music video as they show some green screen, Pink playing multiple characters, and having her daughter play Alice in the music video along with Sacha Baron Cohen and Johnny Depp appearing as their characters from the movie

 

Audio commentary for the movie with director James Bobin

 

Five deleted scenes with optional audio commentary by director James Bobin.  He cut the scenes for pacing reasons even though it might have been good for him to leave the first two scenes in the final movie

 

The movie in standard definition on DVD

 

A code to download and/ or stream the movie in digital HD

 

FINAL ANALYSIS:  ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS is a visually interesting sequel that provides excellent character development for the characters of Underland while offering nothing new for Alice.  The extras are quite good on the blu-ray

 

This review is ©10-23-2016 David Blackwell and cannot be reprinted without permission.  Send all comments to feedback@enterline-media.com

 

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