Summary
When Middle Schooler Meg's scientist Father went missing, it ruined her life, but upon meeting Charles Wallace, her brother's, new other-worldly friends, she is offered the chance to find her Father and heal her broken family, all while saving the universe?
Fuzzy Memory
I read the book this film is based on, "A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L'Engle," not when I was a child, as most who have read the book. I actually read it over several plane rides during a whirlwind of job in the American East South East. As such my memory is untainted by nostalgia but also clouded in the jet lag sleep deprived haze that accompanies such trip.
So while I enjoyed the book, I did not have the expectations you might expect from your typical, I-read-the-book-when-I-was-a-kid-and-they-better-not-change-a-thing-or-my-childhood-was-a-lie sort of Millennial, even if I do recommend a reading of the book over watching the movie.
A Shining Light
I want to start this review with the one standout of the film. Storm Reid (“Sleight”) is a breath of fresh air. She does such a great job as Meg. What connection people feel in this film is, in my opinion, solely because her uncomfortability in her own skin, her excitement at seeing her father, and her fear that she will fail, are all so keenly felt in her portrayal.
Her performance is a far cry from the wooden performance of Levi Miller (“Pan”), or Deric McCabe's kid (Charles Wallace) who is always eloquently teaching adults how smart children are attitude which never ages particularly well. It is definitely more memorable than watching Mindy Kaling (“Wreck It Ralph”) as Mrs. Who or Reese Witherspoon (“Wild”) as Mrs. Whatsit, simply walking around, grinning like goofballs while a GIGANTIC Oprah Winfrey (“The Color Purple”) (you read that right, she's a giant) does her best to channel Maya Angelou but ends up being more glittery eyebrows than soulful heart.
Defying Expectations
Clearly I am not a fan of this film but as I try to put my finger on why, I struggle. Mostly because there are so many things to say about a film which fails on almost every single level, so I will try to focus on only a couple elements which I found particularly egregious because I would have NEVER expected them from this movie.
It's boring. I never thought I would end up saying it but it is. One of the best things about a film based on a book is that you can move quickly through the slower section which describe things and simply show them, but A Wrinkle In Time (AWIT) spends far more of it's celluloid footage on long scenes of dialogue explaining how the world, and tessering, and who the Mrs.s are, and what the darkness is, than on showing a brilliant universe or a mind expanding tessering scene.
The main reason it is boring is that the story is very poorly paced and structured. AWIT is a short book with a fairly simple plot. Girl's dad disappears; Girl meets Alien Beings/Fairy Godmothers; Godmothers help girl find Dad; Dad is being held prisoner by dark forces; Girl rescues dad from said forces. How do you mess up something so simple? All those story points are there, but they get muddled up with a bunch of side stuff happening that never connects as well as the main plot and ends up distracting from and draining the main plot of it's interest.
There is a subplot in the film about a girl in school who doesn't like Meg. This girl leaves a post it on Meg's locker which makes Meg really sad and all the girls laugh at her. Later we find out that girl lives next door to Meg. After Meg returns from her adventure, the girl looks out the window and waves nicely to Meg. What? Those are her only three scenes. Nothing happens to change her disposition toward Meg and even her disdain for Meg doesn't rise as the movie goes. She just disappears from the story, which is happening on another planet. Why is she in the movie at all?
For a movie under two hours, it feels lumbering and bloated. The woman sitting three seats down from me actually fell asleep.
One of the other things I never thought I'd find myself saying about this film is that it is the most uncreative expression of creativity I've seen in a long time. I would say that even scenes which are supposed to enthrall you with their beauty and wonder and brightness end up being woefully anemic.
There are several scenes in the book which I was looking forward to seeing on screen and I was dramatically underwhelmed by them; not because they weren't what I was expecting, but because they were almost nothing at all.
The first planet they go to is lush green fields and mountains and seas. We see a few little flower creatures and Mrs. Whatsit become a leafy dragon thing they can all ride. But that is it. Nothing else cool going on. It's an alien world, that for the most part, looks just like ours. This place should be mind blowing with it's interesting creatures and plants and rock formations or fungal growth patterns and crazy fish jumping out of the ocean, but there isn't really any of that.
Later in the film, Meg goes to fight the darkness in a giant brain (book) but in the movie the brain is more of a mass of grayblack blobbiness which stretches it's tendrils a bit. It looks more like the titles sequence from the “X-Men” movie, desaturated and blown up large for people to walk on. It is so boring an unimpressive.
On top of it all, some of these graphics are done really poorly. I've seen better work done by amateurs in Adobe After Effects with a couple Video CoPilot tutorials.
The reason this bothers me so much is that in a film which is meant for kids you'd expect things to move pretty well (don't want to bore those kiddos) and be visually amazing. We are expecting a pretty simple straightforward story and what matters the most is the fun and exciting experiences and visuals we are going to be exposed to.
But this movie doesn't lean in hard enough to those things and rather than owning the simple story, tries to complicate the story and make it more interesting. At the same time it makes the visuals less interesting and exciting. What you are left with is uninspiring.
Verdict
I wish I could love this movie. It is exactly the sort of thing I normally would be crying out for more of but in this case I feel the direction just went awry. perhaps the best metaphor for it comes from the film itself.
Oprah Winfrey is the de facto leader of the godmothers and should be powerful and imposing. She never does anything powerful or imposing that we see. She just talks a bunch and about lots of things that don't seem to make much sense or pertain to the task they are all trying to accomplish. But the did make her super big with their computer powers.
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