Time Is of the Essence in the ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ Trailer

Earlier this week, we playfully ribbed the Alice Through the Looking Glass marketing for subjecting the public to a teaser so short that it barely existed at all. (In a way, the teaser had become the teased and we were the true teasers!) Clearly, the scalding heat of our gentle mockery was enough to motivate Disney to get their act together and release a Alice Through the Looking Glass trailer that lasts a little longer than eleven seconds — one-hundred and eleven seconds longer, to be exact. Yes, the first substantial look into the 2010 smash’s sequel is here, five long years later and not a moment too soon. Starting with Alan Rickman’s purred opening line, “You’ve been gone too long, Alice,” a possible nod to the unusually long gap separating installments of the franchise, time is the name of the game.

Time, in the form of a mechanized-clockwork Sacha Baron Cohen, steps in as the primary antagonist for this new adventure. Alice (Mia Wasikowska) will have to best him and traverse the very fabric of space-time itself — represented here as a literal flat circle — if she wants to rescue the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) from the fiery holocaust that’s scorched his home. Besides facilitating buckets and buckets of puns about time, Alice’s adventure will put her back in contact with some familiar faces from Tim Burton’s reboot (James Bobin, the brain behind the recent Muppets films, takes over in the director’s chair), including Anne Hathaway as the White Queen, a big-headed Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen, and Alan Rickman as the hookah-smoking caterpillar.

From the looks of the trailer, new director James Bobin has doubled down on the CGI dreamscapes that turned the first film into a box-office behemoth and drew sneers from critics. Of the many accusations leveled against the 2010 picture — unimaginative, overblown, dull, unimportant — the numbing effect of excessive computer-generated frippery was the most damning,  and while this new trailer doesn’t hint at a change of pace for the franchise, at the very least the magical realm of pocketwatches suspended in air is pleasing to the eyeballs. The film comes to theaters May 27, 2016, but if time really is just a mustachioed Sacha Baron Cohen, then maybe he can do us all a service and bump today forward six months so that we can all see if they’ve managed to iron out the first film’s kinks.