The scenes where Time contemplates a sea of pocket watches dangling in space, each representing a living or dead soul, should be staggeringly beautiful and scary and moving, because the idea itself is magnificent. What's onscreen looks like an edgy Super Bowl ad intended to restart the pocket watch industry by appealing to ironic millennials. The sky, the watches, the walkway on which Time stands, Time's costume, Alice standing behind him—it all looks neither real nor fake, primitive nor sophisticated. A scene of Alice surfing the minute and second hands of an immense stone clock face (time itself) could have had a talismanic power were it not a compendium of immense yet oddly weightless moving pieces and visual cliches—such as the sudden-zoom-out-to-a-God's-eye-view, a shot nearly every CGI-driven blockbuster feels obligated to do even though it hasn't awed anyone since the original "The Matrix."

Every now and then, people ask if films ever offend me. Of course they do. They offend me because their world view is fashionably cynical. They offend me because their racial or sexual politics are glib and crude or because they flatter their target audience's fantasies about themselves instead of challenging them. They offend me because they swagger about trafficking in "edgy" violence that's not abstractly beautiful, mythologically rich, or psychologically complex, but merely opportunistic and cruel.

But the most offensive kind of film is one that spends an enormous amount of money yet seems to have nothing on its mind but money. You give it, they take it. And you get nothing in return but assurances that you're seeing magic and wonder. The movie keeps repeating it in your ear, and flashing it onscreen in big block letters: MAGIC AND WONDER. MAGIC AND WONDER. But there is no magic, no wonder, just junk rehashed from a movie that was itself a rehash of Lewis Carroll, tricked out with physically unpersuasive characters and landscapes and "action scenes," with blockbuster "journey movie" tropes affixed to every set-piece as blatantly as Post-It Notes.

How many small- or medium-sized films were never funded or released because the entire Hollywood studio apparatus has devoted itself to churning out listless fantasies that are machine-tooled for maximum repeatability and exploitability while claiming to be magical and wonderful?

This is not artistry. It's con artistry.