Alice Through The Looking Glass: 10 Reasons It's Worse Than The Original
How much Johnny Depp is too much?
Some six-plus years after Tim Burton's live-action adaptation of Alice in Wonderland hit cinemas, we finally have the belated sequel, with The Muppets' James Bobin taking the directing reins.
Unsurprisingly, critics consider the film a substantial comedown from the original, which they weren't exactly crazy about in the first place. For all of the film's visual splendour, not to mention a terrific, scene-stealing performance from Sacha Baron Cohen as the villainous Time, it's a fundamentally flawed, low-effort movie that's just not really very good at all.
In almost every way, it pales compared to what came before, as is so often the case with belated sequels that languish in development for this long. It's not a shock, but there was definitely potential for the follow-up to fix some of the original movie's messes along the way. Sadly, that hasn't happened in the slightest.
Here are 10 reasons Alice Through the Looking Glass is worse than the original...
10. It Has Little To Do With The Source Material
While it would be fair to say that Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland was itself a loose adaptation of Lewis Caroll's two Alice novels, it did, for its faults, manage to capture much of the essence of the source material...even if it didn't leave a whole lot for this sequel to graze on.
It's painfully evident (and likely explains the 6-year wait between movies) that screenwriter Linda Woolverton struggled to cobble together a plot for this sequel. As the prime rib material from both books had already been mined, Woolverton largely opted to come up with her own original content, the result of which is an incredibly mixed bag and sure to upset many Alice purists.
That said, anyone who loves Alice that much probably shouldn't be watching these movies anyway...