Alice Through The Looking Glass: 10 Reasons It's Worse Than The Original

The movie revolves largely around a time travel plot where Alice must travel into the past and save the Mad Hatter's family to stop him feeling sad. Or something.

While the film's engagement with time travel is extremely shallow and generic, it becomes more offensive when it doesn't even pick a set of logical rules and adhere to them fully.

For starters, Alice finds out early on that the past cannot be changed, as several attempts to alter things (such as stopping the young Red Queen from hitting her head and becoming a tyrant) still happen anyway.

That's all well and good as far as solid time travel rules go, but then this is brazenly contradicted for no rhyme or reason later on, when the Red Queen interacts with her past self and very nearly brings about the destruction of Wonderland.

This is basically why popcorn movies shouldn't ever touch time travel: if they're going to take a "just because" approach to it, then it's hard to get invested in the stakes of what's going on.

Yes, you can argue that the dreamlike nature of Carroll's world means that it doesn't need to adhere to the usual rules, but when something as complex as time travel is involved, it's good to have some rigid ground rules all the same.