Such a frustrating disappointment

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

You know your book is poorly adapted when Disney is still considered the gospel... And that's how Alice is. Nobody gets it right, but this film comes close.The Looking Glass is a world where everyone is speaking in puns, riddles, logical inversions, and nonsense poetry. There's almost no plot or character. It is random, sometimes funny, sometimes tender, sometimes boring, sometimes creepy or insane. It passes over you like a dream, but the best parts endure...Yes, the special effects are dumb. The scenes are cheap. Alice is a hot 20-something instead of cute 7 and a half. blah blah blah... It doesn't matter!What matters is perfect delivery of great lines. Like watching Shakespeare, it all comes down to what the actors say and how they say it.

Both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are classics, rich in atmosphere and with colourful characters. Admittedly they are episodic but in a way that is part of the books' charm. Both are also difficult to adapt because of the structure, the atmosphere and Carroll's way of words, especially Through the Looking Glass where the structure is even more nonsensical and the characters even kookier. This adaptation is a valiant effort and it is on the most part the most faithful adaptation of Through the Looking Glass, whether it is the best is up for debate, I remember liking the 1973 BBC adaptation more but that may change on re-watch. This version is far from perfect, the ending is abrupt, Kate Beckinsale's hair did look too modern and the Walrus and the Carpenter scene felt very badly rushed through, the production values in this scene did look on the amateurish side. While the Wasp with the Wig segment was interesting and well done the adaptation may have made more sense with the Lion and the Unicorn scene intact- it felt like it was meant to be there in the first place but edited out- and the White Knight scene really could have done without the black and white footage which added nothing to the scene. Some of the adaptation especially at the end felt rushed, if they had slowed things down those who had trouble following the story may have understood it a little more. The adaptation does look decent though, very TV-movie-bound, but it is colourful and attractive enough once you get used to Alice's constant clothes changes and Tweedledum and Tweedledee made up to look like characters from A Clockwork Orange. The photography is nicely done and flows decently into each frame and scene. The music is laden with whimsy, a sense of wonder and subtle edge, very like a fantasy adventure score should sound. The script is very true to Carroll's humour and how he wrote, the sing-song-like poetry and oddball nature are most endearing too. A-Sitting on the Gate stood out in this respect. The story maintains the episodic feel that the book has and also the wonderful weirdness(in a couple of scenes a little too weird admittedly) and whimsical charm. In terms of individual scenes, the melancholic White Knight scene and the really genuinely spooky train sequence stood out. The flower garden scene was colourful also, and the White Queen and Red Queen encounters are nicely done. The jabberwocky is much scarier in the Natalie Gregory adaptation(which I also preferred over this despite some of the songs and casting not quite being there), but it still makes the same impact here. The cast are fine. Kate Beckinsale is too old- Kate Burton was also too old, around the same age, in the excellent theatre production from 1983 and she actually still worked- but there is still the winsomeness, assertiveness, sense of confusion and simple charm that you'd expect Alice to have. Ian Richardson, Marc Warren and Steve Coogan also give nice contributions, but the standouts were Sian Phillips' menacingly imposing Red Queen, Penelope Wilton as a riotuous White Queen(though much more subtle than the hilariously batty Carol Channing in the Natalie Gregory adaptation) and especially the touching White Knight- the only sympathetic character on Alice's adventures- of Ian Holm. In conclusion, a good if flawed version(though if people dislike it it is easy to see why), Through the Looking Glass is a very difficult book to adapt and this does valiantly with it. 7/10 Bethany Cox

I didn't really read Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass which is the film's basis for his version. It has a first rate cast like the red queen played by Sian Phillips in one silly red costume and the white queen played by Penelope Wilton again in a silly white costume. There is too much talking at times and not much action for this film to serve a purpose. At the end of the tale, I didn't understand what happened to Alice all along. Did she learn a lesson about the looking glass. Anyway, the costumes are definitely silly maybe too silly to be taken seriously. I didn't understand what Alice and the world in the Looking Glass was doing. I didn't understand how the white queen went from small to life-size to talk with Alice. I thought there were some moments but the writing seemed to take forever for things to make sense or none at all. Still, it should be shown regarding the Alice books.

Are there redeeming features here? Because I can't find them. This film is horrible on just so many levels.The set design is shoddy to the point that it looks like a high school performance for the most part (despite the assembly of a great cast of English character actors - Ian Holm, Steve Coogan, Kate Beckinsale as Alice - we know where the money went then).The cinematography is awful, constantly leaving the viewer second guessing the possible motivation for the camera changes - Blair Witch style hand-held becomes a staple for some reason, but why? Are we meant to be scared? I mean, hey, I was...but not for the right reasons.The script is not so bad, but then how could it fail, coming from such a magnificent text to begin with. Rather, the problem is the pacing and lack of action - how often do we need to sit, bored and restless, as the actors and camera sit statically in front of us, reading slab after slab of text? This is supposed to be a film, a dynamic movement - for the love of God give me some movement.There is just so much bad to be said about this film that it's not worth going on. Oh, in case you haven't quite figured it out yet, don't see this film. Go rent the Disney animated version of the original Alice instead, or, better yet - read the book.