One of the most terrible cases of headache-inducing CGI excess of our time. Alice Through the Looking Glass has the presumption that if you put a heroine through a wormhole, and color that wormhole a billion-gazillion different colors, it will gobsmack us with adventure! Mia Wasikowska, already so awful as Alice in the previous installment, has no gumption or ebullience once again, it’s all bookworm sulk with her. Not that the movie could have been saved by the lame plot alone: The Hatter (Johnny Depp, so twee I wanted to hang myself) is doomed to a case of the sulks himself, so Alice has to go back in time to rewrite history.

It’s better that you never see this movie, but if you do, there’s a lot of incoherence when it comes to the Depp’s Hatter, and what went wrong with his parents. But the why of it, I don’t know, I kind of missed it – something to do with a feud between the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) and the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) perhaps. Yawn. You will have to read somebody else’s review to get a more credible answer than that. The movie in general is one long frenetic “ride” that supplies more whiplash than amazement. It’s like the “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” movie without the nuance, just lots of crazy electrostatic waves in the background while Alice goes on her berserk journey. There are scenes with Sacha Baron Cohen as Time, a godlike presider of time’s constructs, that feels like it goes on forever. And by the time Alice is locked into an asylum, I counted it as a homage to Zach Snyder’s “Sucker Punch” of all things, which is nothing worth crowing about.

“Alice Through the Looking Glass” is a takeoff of the Lewis Carroll book from ages ago, but for our time, it’s neverending hideous CGI splatter. After an hour, I was like, “Hurry up, already, finish this goddamn movie up.”

118 Minutes. Rated PG.

SCI-FI & FANTASY / GOTH TEENS / SATURDAY NIGHT HEAD-SCRATCHER

Film Cousins: “Time Bandits” (1981); “Treasure Planet” (2002); “Alice in Wonderland” (2010); “Pan” (2015).