...A Little Tedium in this Land

So I wasn’t a fan of the first half of this two part, two movie special. Some of this can be chalked up to the basic fact that I don’t think Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a story I really give a shit about (if you will allow me to be so blunt). I can understand why people of the time were so enamored with it, the story being a weird, trippy, fanciful adventure unlike much of what had been written and published at the time. But by the same measure, it’s a story that hasn’t aged, one that feels very old and out of touch with storytelling standards (let alone cultural norms) of our modern era. The story, as I’ve noted before, just doesn’t work for me, in basically any version we’ve covered yet.

The second half, though, brings in new material for us to enjoy: as much of Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There as could reasonably fit into a ninety minute made-for-TV movie. Most adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s works stop with the first book, while maybe stealing the occasional Tweedledee and Tweedledum to flesh out scenes. But while there are close to 100 adaptations of Carroll’s first book of Alice’s adventures, Through the Looking Glass has been visited far less frequently, making this two-part adaptation a rare time to see what Alice’s second adventure was like. Spoilers: it also sucks.

Although in the book Alice sees a world through a mirror and elects to climb through, this second half of the two-part special picks up with Alice already in the world, confused at how she got there and desperate for a way to escape. A strange encounter with an owl leads to the bird telling Alice that she can’t know the way to get home because she is far too young. She is but a pawn in this world and, for her to grow up and find her path, she needs to be a queen. A chance meeting with the Red Queen indicates to Alice that the world of “Looking Glass Land” (which, point of order, is used interchangeably in this special with “Wonderland”) is laid out like a chess board and since Alice is a pawn she needs to cross the board to become a queen.

Her journey allows her to meet many of the denizens of this world, from the royals of both sides of the chess board, to birds and lions and unicorns as well. She meets some rude animals on a train, stumbles upon the house of Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and is rescued by the White Knight. Through it all many of the people recite poetry at her and engage in all manner of wordplay. When finally she reaches the end of the board, Alice is magically crowned a queen. She then has to host a tea party for all the denizens of the world, including not only the Red and White Queens but also the Queen of Hearts and her whole royal entourage. The party is ruined, though, by the arrival of the Jabberwocky and it’s up to Alice to find a way to dispel the beast and save the day, once and for all.

Structurally this second half is like the first. Alice walks through the world, meeting people and engaging in skits with them. Wordplay is had, songs are sung, and then Alice is left confused before she walks off to find someone else to annoy her. These adventures are random, with things thrown about for the sake of being strange and weird. It’s a curious world, prone to curious adventures, and Alice floats through all of it not quite sure what to make of anything going on around her. And then the adventure ends without Alice learning much of anything at all. She really is a silly girl in a silly world.

Like with the first part (and, really, every adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) the big issue with this second story is that Alice doesn’t feel like an active agent in her adventures. She goes from one place to the next, but it’s the weird and curious people around her that drive the story. She stands and listens while Tweedledee and Tweedledum tell the story of “The Walrus and the Carpenter”, but she really doesn’t learn anything from it. Frankly she doesn’t learn much of anything from any part of her adventure at all, making one wonder what the point was in putting her (and us) through all this.

Ostensibly this story is supposed to be about Alice learning to grow up. That was the theme started in the first half (which, honestly, that film failed at illustrating that point as well), but here Alice is repeatedly told she needs to grow up. It’s no mistake that Alice’s adventure started because she wanted to attend an “adult only” tea party and then, by the end of her adventure, she gets to be a queen hosting a tea party. The issue is that she doesn’t earn this. She just walks and things happen but there’s never a moment for the character where she processes what she saw and learns something from it. None of the adventures challenge her to grow up, they’re simply strange skits with people singing, dancing, and reciting poetry. The theme of the story isn’t carried through any of the skit, weakening the premise.

The funniest (unintentionally) thing is that when Alice finally has to confront the Jabberwocky so she can get home, she yells at him that she doesn’t believe in him. “I’m an adult! I don’t believe in you!” she yells, like she’s a seven-year-old having a tantrum.In that moment she seems like a petulant child, not a grown up, and yet the movie decides this was the lesson she needed to learn and she gets to go back home. It would be ironic if I wasn’t pretty certain the writers simply failed to understand the premise they were working towards.

As for the production itself, it’s just boring. For starters there isn’t enough song and dance this time around to make the production feel likely. The first half of the special had a ton of singing and dancing, making it feel like a variety show. This work is far more staid, with almost an entire act going by before we get a song and a little softshoe. It’s much longer still until we get one lively enough to actually wake the audience from the stupor they’ve fallen into. That song comes from the Tweedle siblings and it’s only notable because halfway into the song, when the Walrus and the Carpenter are contemplating eating some oysters, the oysters come out and they’re dancing girls wearing full-body shells. It’s nightmare fuel, but also acid trip amazing, and I will not deny I sat up for this bit because it was just so weird. Sadly that was also the one good moment of this special before it got tedious again.

It’s hard to shake the vibe that the production team had all their good ideas for the first film and then just kind of scraped by for this second part. The costumes feel more ragged and basic, the scenes are far less dynamic, and even the cast of actors feels even more D-list than the previous special. This feels like the bottom of the barrel dregs wrapped up in their own special but not given nearly as much care or attention. Maybe that’s because this special didn’t have nearly as much material to pull from (no Disney movie to give guidance) or because the creators didn’t know Through the Looking Glass nearly as well as Alice’s Adventures. But whatever is the case, this is not a good second half at all.

Really, this two-part special is a massive failure. It’s very long (over three hours for both parts together) and very tedious. The same kind of stuff happens again and again for three hours, and then Alice gets to go home. We learn nothing, get nothing from this, and in the end all we really know is we don’t want to go back to this version of Wonderland ever again. Thankfully Carroll didn’t write any further books for Alice or we might have had to suffer through a third part before this was all said and done.

I guess there were some small favors, then, at least.