Alice Through The Looking Glass is a sumptuous looking film. It’s a movie where you’ll see the personification of Time riding a lightning-infused railway cart over the rolling oceans of four-dimensional space. Where hulking soldiers made out of fruits and vegetables cower as they’re bullied by a diminutive woman with an oversized head. Where Johnny Depp wears a ton of extremely colorful mascara.

But for all its visual inventiveness, Alice Through The Looking Glass ends up as a mundane experience. For every instance the film makes you gape in wonder at its unique characters and locations, it also throws in an all-too-ordinary explanation for the sheer strangeness of it all. The Mad Hatter’s eccentricity? There’s a tragic and altogether human backstory. The Red Queen’s head? There’s similar melodrama behind that, too. Alice Through The Looking Glass refuses to let something strange just be, and a lot of the magic is stripped away as a result.

To its credit, the film has a propulsive energy, bounding along from locale to locale as well as back and forth through time. It gets off to a roaring start, with the titular Alice Kingsleigh (Mia Wasikowska)–now a respected sea captain–trying to outrun pirates in an exciting sea-bound sequence. Once that adventure ends, Alice finds herself back in London, forced to contend with the banality of ordinary life and faced with a horrible proposition: end her days as a sea captain and take on a new job as a desk-bound clerk.

Alice wants to continue to do the impossible, so it’s little wonder that she readily accepts Absalom the Butterfly’s (nee Caterpillar) invitation to travel through a looking glass back to Wonderland to right a great wrong. It seems the Mad Hatter (played again by Johnny Depp) has fallen into a deep funk, convinced that his long-dead family are, in fact, alive. Not one of the Hatter’s strange friends–the portly Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the March Hare, or the Cheshire Cat–want to believe Hatter’s tale. Just to be clear: some morbidly obese twins, a talking rabbit, and a levitating cat think an eccentric hatmaker is stretching believability for thinking his family may have survived a catastrophe years earlier.

This is an issue Alice Through The Looking Glass continually runs into: its attempts to inject human drama into its surreal surroundings fall flat, resulting in strange characters acting in narratively strange ways. Take Alice. Early in the film, she declares that she wants to do several impossible things before every breakfast. But when she arrives in Wonderland, she also refuses to believe Hatter. The White Queen (Anne Hathaway) suggests the only way to save Hatter is to travel back in time and save his family. And so Alice ventures to the home of Time himself (played by Sacha Baron Cohen), stealing a device to travel to the past despite warnings that doing so would unravel the very fabric of reality.

Alice Through The Looking Glass is a rollercoaster, bouncing from scene to scene throughout different time periods as Alice attempts to help Hatter. It’s a fast-paced movie, but not an involving one. There’s little of the charming humor of the first Alice film here, outside of a few funny utterances by Cohen’s Time (his constant contradiction of himself is the film’s comedic highlight). And none of the other action scenes match the the enthralling ship chase that opens the movie.

What’s left, then, is the movie’s strange cast of characters, who through their visual oddity and kooky personalities lifted the first film and gave it an exciting air of whimsy. Those strange characters are still here, but there are a lot fewer of them this time around. They exist on the periphery, with the focus squarely on Alice, the Hatter, and to a lesser extent, the Red Queen. If you haven’t seen the first film, you may be confused as to why Alice feels such a connection to the Hatter (and is willing to destroy all of space-time to help him), because Through The Looking Glass skips through any of that essential relationship building. But when it does stop to explain a character or their motivations, the melodrama the film falls back on is at odds with the fantastical nature of the world Alice finds herself in.

It’s a pity, then, that the strangeness of this franchise has been diluted in Alice Through The Looking Glass. The film can be a breathless ride, but the more it stops to explain the why, the less wonderful Wonderland seems to be.