REVIEW: Alice Through the Looking Glass
The movie Alice Through the Looking Glass is the famous sequel to the well known movie and book, Alice in Wonderland. With a complete different director from the original movie, James Bobin the director of the Muppets movie, continues the story of Alice and her adventures with the same actors and characters from the previous movie, which had been directed by Tim Burton. Some well-known names reappear, such as Mia Wasikowska as Alice, Anne Hathaway as the White Queen, and Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. The movie was released in May 27, 2016 and since the day of the release it has made about 298.8 million USD in the Box office. Overall, after seeing this movie last summer, I have positive feelings about it. It seems like most of the movie makers’ time was spent on the costumes and animations rather than on the actual plot line itself.
Unlike the previous movie, where Alice stumbles upon the rabbit hole, she finds her way slipping in from a mirror back to Underland with the White Queen, the Cheshire Cat, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and the White Rabbit. When she makes it there her friends tell her about the Mad Hatter whose health has declined due to the loss of his family, who he believes was killed by the evil younger sister of the White Queen, the Red Queen. Hoping to find a way to reverse his families death, Alice steals the Chronosphere from the keeper of time (Time) to travel into the past. Running from Time but also looking to correct the past, Alice encounters young Mad Hatter and the evil Red Queen.
The plot within Alice Through the Looking Glass seemed almost too busy in this sequel. It seemed that they tried to throw the movie together. It felt as if the director rushed from one point to the next.Though the movie wasn't entirely terrible, it is easy to see that the first movie was much more tolerable compared to the second continuation to Alice’s story in wonderland probably due to the fact of different directors.
Compared to the previous movie directed by Tim Burton, I believe that the animations were fairly decent within this film, but it felt as though the costumes were extremely overdone, making it feel more like Willy Wonka than an Alice in Wonderland sequel. It did seem as if they took a lot of time and effort to get every scene just right.
Many sources like Rotten Tomato gave the movie low scores and bad reviews mainly about the costumes and plot line. Rotten Tomato gave the movie a 30%, IMDb gave it a 6.3/10 average, and Metacritic gave the movie an overall score of 34%. Despite many bad reviews I believe the movie was alright overall.
The movie will be released to home video on October 18,2016. It can be found for purchase or renting on DVD, Netflix, Amazon, and Redbox.