I really wasn’t in the last bit impressed with Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, but that movie made a ridiculous amount of money, so of course they’ve made a sequel. One of the biggest problems that I have with these movies is that they completely miss the point of the source material. Alice in Wonderland is basically Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – it’s not supposed to have a through-line plot, it’s just a series of encounters without logic or rules. Whimsy is the only constant. It’s supposed to be like a dream. The Disney animated version gets this stuff right, but these Tim Burton films try to apply a strange kind of mythology to it, where the “Frabjous Day” is an actual day, not just something made up for a poem. There are all these bizarre politics between the queens, as if Wonderland was an actual kingdom. The Mad Hatter has a contrived backstory. Ugh. I could go on and on. Anyway, this trailer for Alice Through the Looking Glass looks like Sucker Punch: Redux mixed with American McGee’s Alice (another interpretation of the property that understands things better than this movie does), but it looks like just another CGI overload crapfest. The hard-rocking cover of Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit almost had me convinced that this could be good, but a second watch has told me otherwise. Blech.
Alice Through the Looking Glass comes out May 27, 2016.