There's a moment midway through Alice Through the Looking Glass that hints at a much darker story, in which the orgy of CG gibberish ceases and Alice (Mia Wasikowska) wakes up from her reverie. She's strapped to a bed in a grim Victorian-era madhouse, with a psychotic-looking doctor (Andrew Scott, Sherlock's Moriarty) threatening to inject her with a nasty-looking syringe. Before any real harm can be done, of course, Alice breaks back into the movie's fantasy world to continue on her quack-a-doodle quest.
That quest—Looking Glass' main narrative thrust—is almost indescribably confusing, an unholy concoction of Lewis Carroll's brilliant nonsense shoehorned into every ass-backward cliché from every cut-rate screenplay-writing night-school class in Los Angeles County. There are moments when the outrageousness and visual cacophony almost push this sequel to Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland into fits of surreal inspiration. But the horrible storyline—centered on a deeply stupid MacGuffin in the form of time-travel machine called the Chronosphere—and profoundly awful performances from Johnny Depp and Anne Hathaway make this a tough sit.