Meanwhile, the returning screenwriter Linda Woolverton (best remembered for “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Lion King”) has again plundered elements from Carroll’s books and reshuffled them into a pedestrian narrative, replacing his sui generis nonsense with her own strenuously unimaginative and literal-minded storytelling.
Burton’s devotees will be relieved to learn that, even in his absence, “Alice Through the Looking Glass” is a feast of garishly overwrought, effects-encrusted production design. Still, it was enough of a box-office hit to garner a follow-up, this time under the direction of James Bobin (who directed the two most recent “Muppets” movies). Their live-action “Alice in Wonderland” was less an adaptation of its source material - which included both Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865) and “Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There” (1871) - than an exercise in what the Mock Turtle memorably termed “Uglification.” A gloppy-looking 3-D eyesore weighed down by noisy action sequences and other soul-deadening focus-group notions of what kids want from their fantasy entertainment, the movie reproduced none of Carroll’s cleverness, imagination or mastery of language, or even the easygoing charm of Disney’s 1951 animated version. It’s a pity she doesn’t set the device for 2007: Perhaps she might have retroactively persuaded the director Tim Burton and the decision-makers at Disney to spare us the further desecration of a literary classic. Availing herself of an early DeLorean prototype called the Chronosphere, Alice (played again by Mia Wasikowska) goes careening back and forth through time, embarking on a frenzied quest to save her friend the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) by plumbing his messy family history and correcting the mistakes of the past. In Disney’s crass, pointless sequel to its similarly crass, pointless “Alice in Wonderland” (2010), our heroine doesn’t just tumble down a rabbit hole or step through a magic mirror. “Alice Through the Looking Glass” is a movie for anyone who ever skimmed a passage of Lewis Carroll and thought, “This is great, but it could use a bit more ‘Terminator.’”
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