Starring Mia Wasikowska. Rated PG. Now playing.

Packed with candy-coloured 3-D dreamscapes, outlandish costumes, and hyperactive characters, Alice Through the Looking Glass is the Slurpee equivalent of movie-going—and depending on your mood, it might inflict a similar brain freeze.

If possible, the sequel is even more jacked up than Tim Burton’s warped original, with director James Bobin steering this wildly veering ride. Johnny Depp is back as the lisping, ginger-haired Hatter, Helena Bonham Carter returns with her heart-shaped head as the Red Queen, and Mia Wasikowska is here again as the older, protofeminist Alice—just back from years sailing the seas.

Having pilfered most of Lewis Carroll’s two books for the first installment, screenwriter Linda Woolverton has to improvise a lot of the plot here, at least making a nod to Through the Looking Glass’s play with time and space. In a welcome addition, Sacha Baron Cohen takes the role of temperamental Time himself, the back of his neck revealing gears and wheels, his accent a twisted mix of Christoph Waltz and Ah-nuld, his lair a kind of gothic-mechanical cathedral that opens to a wide sky of hanging pocket watches that each mark a death.

It’s an original universe, but like so much of the digitally generated world in the film, it appears a bit thin and artificial—a look that might have stunned in 2010’s Alice in Wonderland, but that pales next to more recent wonders like The Jungle Book.

As far as plot, the Hatter has fallen into a funk, and Alice has to travel back through time in a kind of steampunk–Jules Verne spaceship to try to save the family he lost to the Jabberwocky. Along the way, we discover the family dysfunction at the root of his troubles, as well as those of the evil Red Queen—a story with more inner logic than Carroll might have preferred. But by the end it’s hard to really engage in the narrative when you’re being assaulted with enough imagery to make you wish you had your own mirror to escape through.