Alice Through the Look­ing Glass

There’s no turn­ing back. Alice Through the Look­ing Glass opens in 1874, with Alice Kingsleigh aboard her father’s ship, The Won­der, being forced by pur­su­ing pirate ships to pass, impos­si­bly, through the rocky Straits of Malacca.

A full year lat­er (with text pre­cise­ly cal­i­brat­ing time’s pas­sage), Alice is back in Lon­don, some­what old­er than the ado­les­cent whom Mia Wasikows­ka (her­self six years old­er) played in Tim Burton’s Alice in Won­der­land. She is, as oth­ers com­ment, now very much her father’s daugh­ter, and also back where she start­ed – but things have changed, and she has changed too.

The dull, das­tard­ly suit­or (Leo Bill) whose wed­ding pro­pos­al she reject­ed at the end of the first film has moved on and mar­ried anoth­er, and is now threat­en­ing to kick Alice’s moth­er (Lind­say Dun­can) out of house and home if Alice will not give up The Won­der (metaphor alert!). For while Vic­to­ri­an Britain could just about tol­er­ate in the younger Alice the free-spir­it­ed adven­tur­ous­ness and inde­pen­dence that give her her ​‘much­ness’, those same qual­i­ties can hard­ly be coun­te­nanced in a ful­ly grown woman, and indeed are regard­ed as symp­toms of mad­ness and hys­te­ria. And it is not as though Alice can wind the clock back.

Or maybe she can. For, after being guid­ed to a mag­i­cal look­ing glass by the but­ter­fly Absolem (voiced by the late Alan Rick­man, the film’s ded­i­ca­tee and anoth­er emblem of time’s irrev­o­ca­ble flow) and pass­ing through it back to Under­land, she dis­cov­ers that her old friend Tar­rant ​‘the Mad Hat­ter’ High­topp (John­ny Depp) has sunk into a pos­si­bly ter­mi­nal depres­sion because of unre­solved feel­ings about his deceased father (feel­ings that mir­ror Alice’s own for the late Mr Kingsleigh). So it is that she sets about on a hare-brained scheme to trav­el back in time and stop Zanik High­topp (Rhys Ifans) being killed by the Jab­ber­wock, despite warn­ings from Time (Sacha Baron Cohen, hilar­i­ous as a high­ly unusu­al ​‘vil­lain’) that, ​“you can­not change the past, but you may learn some­thing from it.”

The irony is that even as Alice’s attempts to rewrite the his­to­ry of Under­land are doomed to fail­ure at every turn, once more Lin­da Woolver­ton suc­ceeds in her own rad­i­cal rewrit­ing – not just of Lewis Carroll’s texts, but of the fil­mo­gra­phies of the film’s lead actors. If the seas on which Alice sails in the open­ing sequence resem­ble visu­al­ly the waves of time that she will lat­er surf, they also recon­fig­ure the nau­ti­cal bat­tles from the Pirates of the Caribbean series that con­veyed Depp to super­star­dom in the 2000s. Mean­while the elab­o­rate clock­work cogs that con­sti­tute Time’s cas­tle, and the ​‘Gold­en Army’ of glow­ing steam­punk robots that do Time’s bid­ding, overt­ly evoke (and Dis­ney­fy) the aes­thet­ic of Guiller­mo del Toro, whose Crim­son Peak also starred Wasikowska.

All this revi­sion­ism makes the very act of adap­ta­tion – the effort to trans­form past mate­ri­als into some­thing new – one of the film’s prin­ci­pal, self-con­scious dra­mas. Alice’s mad dash through a par­al­lel uni­verse of Vic­to­ri­ana reveals inven­tive pre­quel-like back­sto­ries. Time is (lit­er­al­ly) against this Alice. But in her trav­els through time she encoun­ters much younger ver­sions of Hat­ter, Twee­dle­dum and Twee­dledee (Matt Lucas) and the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry). We also find out how the Red Queen (Hele­na Bon­ham Carter) came to have such a mis­shapen head, how her destruc­tive enmi­ty against the White Queen (Anne Hath­away) had its ori­gins in a child­hood dis­pute over mere crumbs, and how Hat­ter and his friends came to be caught in an end­less tea party.

Direc­tor James Bobin, who had pre­vi­ous­ly worked with Cohen in TV’s Da Ali G Show, helped cre­ate Flight of the Con­chords and helmed the last two Mup­pet movies, here man­ages to keep seri­ous themes (regret, mor­tal­i­ty) afloat while steer­ing them through some very wit­ty dia­logue and beau­ti­ful­ly grotesque design work – includ­ing the Red Queen’s staff of Arcim­bol­do-esque fruit folk, dis­grun­tled that their iras­ci­ble mis­tress keeps eat­ing their body parts. The reap­pear­ance of some char­ac­ters from Alice in Won­der­land – the Dor­mouse, the March Hare, the White Rab­bit, Bayard the Blood­hound and the Ban­der­snatch – feels like mere fan ser­vice, and might eas­i­ly have been cut.

For­tu­nate­ly ample com­pen­sa­tion is offered by new (if ancient) antag­o­nist Time, not just half-man half-clock but also half-grave wiz­ard half-pompous fool. At his com­ic, com­plex best, Cohen steals the show – while his Time also ensures that Alice, after sev­er­al flawed regres­sions, can final­ly move on, rec­on­ciled to her past and car­ry­ing her family’s tra­di­tion of female inde­pen­dence for­ward into new seas and a new century.