Alice Through The Looking Glass forgets that Wonderland stories are not about resolutions, but eccentric insanity.
Alice Through the Looking Glass Synopsis
After being ditched by her fiancé as well as losing her father’s ship, Alice meets Absolem and returns to Wonderland. There, the White Queen tells Alice that her dear friend, the Mad Hatter, is fading away because of his deceased family and that the only way to save him might be to manipulate time. Adopting the White Queen’s advice, Alice then journeys to meet Time, a part-human, part-clock demi-god, and in her desperation to save the Mad Hatter, steals Time’s Chronosphere. As she tumbles through history using the power of the device, Alice learns the cause of the animosity between the Mad Hatter, the White Queen, and the Red Queen. She also discovers that as Time cautioned, history might truly be unchangeable.
Snappy Review
You’d agree with me when I say Alice in Wonderland was one of the darkest, most disturbing children’s story ever written?
Beneath the eccentric characters and outrageous places are so many distressing questions. What was it all about? What did the characters represent? Did Alice really visit Wonderland, or was she a terribly disturbed child soon to grow into some kind of sociopath?
If you think these questions are inane, know that many writers have long speculated about them. In 2000, there was even a psychological horror game that portrayed Alice as a knife-wielding asylum patient.
Alice in Wonderland (2010) firmly rejects all these speculations, though, by re-imagining Alice as a headstrong heroine destined to save Wonderland. In this sequel, they even go a step further by including the theme of redemption through an epic adventure.
This entertains, to an extent, and there are sporadic moments in the movie that either awes or enchants. Problem though, who reads or watches Alice stories for such moments?
An Alice story is about flirting with the concept of insanity. It’s about madness and inexplicable idiosyncrasies too. For every villain to be given a sympathetic back-story, and then to ultimately find satisfying salvation, doesn’t that just destroy the purpose?
Wonderland, in the process, is also reduced to no more than your run-of-the-mill talking-animals imaginary world.
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