Alice Through the Looking Glass
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Alice Through the Looking Glass

The trouble with reviewing a sequel when the original was a): awful, but b): successful, is that there’s not much of a point in complaining about the same stuff all over again. Clearly whatever was wrong with the original wasn’t enough to keep audiences away, so in a sense it clearly wasn’t “wrong” in the first place. On the other hand, Alice Through the Looking Glass… is still pretty much terrible.

Alice (Mia Wasikowska), having learnt the girl power message of the first film well, is now a sea captain, only when she returns to Victorian England she discovers she’s actually massively in debt and is about to lose her ship to a bunch of stuffy toffs. Fortunately she promptly falls through a mirror and returns to Wonderland, where it turns out the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) is clinically depressed due to his dead family. Time to steal a time machine from Time himself (Sasha Baron Cohen) and explore the grim backstories of the main cast.

It looks pretty and the cast do their best, but the dialogue is awful and the story is a videogame progression through levels exploring everyone’s daddy issues. It seems sometimes looking pretty is enough to get you through.

Reviewed by Anthony Morris