The White Queen (Anne Hathaway), Tweedledee and Tweedledum (Matt Lucas), and an array of talking furry friends convince Alice the only way to help a depressed and dying Hatter is to time travel and learn what happened to the Hatter’s deceased family. Only Alice can save the Hatter and that includes borrowing a time travelling device from Mr Time himself.
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Director James Bobin (Muppets Most Wanted) fills Burton’s creative hat and impressively still maintains the unique surrealism of Wonderland.
And Disney’s Alice Through the Looking Glass is set three years after the events of Alice in Wonderland.
The time travel comes after returning screenwriter Linda Woolverton, a Disney veteran, expends a great deal of effort acclimating us to 1874 Britain, where Alice, clad in a peacock-colored dress from China, has become the female-empowerment captain of her father’s ship. Sacha Baron Cohen plays time with the requisite amount of charisma.
Heaven bless and preserve Hollywood fabulist Tim Burton and his delightfully twisted creative genius. Johnny Depp feels oddly at home returning to the Hatter, Helena Bonham Carter is having a blast as the Red Queen and Sacha Baron Cohen tries to bring a duplicitous nature to Time. The entire creative thrust of this creation by Carroll dealt with the idea of there not being too much difference between dreams and reality.
Assuming Alice Through the Looking Glass follows that pattern, we expect the Alice Through the Looking Glass DVD and Blu-Ray release date to be around November or December 2016.
The highly-anticipated fantasy adventure, Alice Through The Looking Glass, starts showing in 3D at Nu Metro Woodlands and Nu Metro Menlyn Park in Pretoria, and nationwide, from Friday 27 May.
I knew that in the sequel, Alice Through the Looking Glass (Rialto and Reading), all pretensions of sticking to the source material had been ditched.
Helena Bonham Carter reprises her role as the Red Queen. Unfortunately, neither actor is Johnny Depp, so there seems to be the thinking that the audience deeply cares about a deeply irritating character who looks like the offspring of Carrot Top and Bat Boy.
Depp is wasted here, spending most of his time sick in bed while other characters mourn his impending death.
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And of course, that first, real world story gets roped back in at the very end but it feels completely superfluous and without outcome. But in this sequel, six years later, not only has James Bobin replaced Burton but the magic has gone as well. It was also lovely to hear the late Alan Rickman as the voice of the butterfly Abolsem as well as Stephen Fry as the Cheshire cat and Michael Sheen as the White Rabbit.
