I saw
this film with a friend the other night, and while I certainly wouldn’t call it
a good movie, it’s also a somewhat
frustrating one, because it contains a handful of strong points – elements
that, if pursued more deftly, might have resulted in a much better film. That’s what I want to look at today, things
that I feel went both right and wrong.
(Note: I’m sticking strictly with
the movie here. The current allegations
against Johnny Depp are another matter.)
A few spoilers.
General
complaints first. It feels disjointed to
me that the movie’s look is one of wonder and whimsy while the overall
storyline is bogged down by family drama.
Season 1 of Once Upon a Time
sold the Mad Hatter as a tragic (yet dark) figure, but try as Alice Through the Looking Glass might,
it really can’t pull off the same. All
the sad eyes feel forced, the familial fallings-out feel too tritely-written,
and the prevailing tone of the whole thing just feels out of place. (Also, speaking of Once Upon a Time, the Queen of Hearts’s childhood origin story
makes Regina’s villainous motivation seem almost rational.) To couple the father-son, sister-sister angst
with the technical visuals and bonkers silliness of Wonderland doesn’t work for
me.
As with
the first film, the less you know about the book, the more sense the story
makes, but I don’t begrudge it that.
After all, it was sold from the beginning as a revisionist version of
Alice’s adventures. Besides, I’m not so
attached to the book that I mind all the changes, and it’s not like the book
would give too much of a cohesive story arc for a film to work with,
anyway. While some of the newly-imagined
plot, like Hatter angst, doesn’t interest me, others, like Hero!Alice, are
pretty neat. On the latter front,
Alice’s transformation into a BAMF is written a little too obviously at time,
but I like the general idea of it, and some of it comes off really well. The opening scene, wherein Alice (now
traveling the world in a ship left to her by her late father) escapes a band of
pirates due to her knowledge of the sea, creative thinking, and sheer nerve,
makes me very happy, and that combination of smarts and bravery serves her well
when she gets back to Wonderland.
It’s
interesting to me that every scene set in our world is basically, “Boo,
Victorian misogyny! Go feminism!” It’s not surprising that Alice would receive
pushback from her way of life there, and that it would be hard for her to
combat something she can’t solve like a riddle or fight with a sword; I was
definitely a little impressed when, mid-film, a Victorian doctor declares her
to suffering from “female hysteria.”
That said, this storyline is also written too on-the-nose at times, and
I don’t think the threads between Alice’s struggle for independence in England
and her heroic journey in Wonderland are drawn quite clearly enough. Again, I feel a real disconnect between the
different parts of the film. There are
good pieces that don’t seem to blend organically into the whole.
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