Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016)

It's taken me about five years to circle back to the A's.  This is still a fairly slight sequel but it is much more watchable than I originally decided.  The Hatter is still pretty annoying but Wasikowska more than makes up for it.  Originally watched 05 Mar 17.    I'm a little surprised this didn't get nominated for score or costumes or makeup or something.  It's kind of a terrible movie, but that's never stopped the Academy before.

Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is now the captain of her father's ship, Wonder, but her expeditions are being met with raised eyebrows back in London.  The ship's backer, her former fiance, Hamish (Leo Bill), has decided to leverage the Kingsleigh house in order to force Alice into a more proper job.  Angry at this sudden betrayal, Alice follows a butterfly through a mirror in Hamish's house and into Wonderland.  Things are not going well here, either.  The Hatter (Johnny Depp) is in a deep depression.  He has discovered a new piece of evidence that leads him to believe his family was not killed by the Jabberwocky after all and he wants Alice to find them.  To do that, she must "borrow" the Chronosphere from Time (Sacha Baron Cohen) and go back to view the past.  Since she is not of the Wonderland timeline, there is very little risk she will create a paradox, but Time is still not going to just let her have it.  So she steals it.

If this had been made a year, even two, after Alice in Wonderland, I would probably have liked it more.  But six years between films is a long time.  I found myself struggling to care about any of the characters, even as the film presented new backstory for the competing Red and White Queens, the Hatter, and Alice herself.  Plus, Sacha Baron Cohen's accent kept moving around from a standard British one to a weird early-Schwartzeneggar one and it was irritating.  I am over Johnny Depp as the Hatter and I am over Wonderland.