Don't Waste Your Time with "A Wrinkle in Time". Watch "Time Bandits" Instead!
A Wrinkle in Time (2018)
Directed by Ava DuVernay
Screenplay by Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell
Based on the novel by Madeleine L’Engle
Rated PG
Before I proceed I need to state that I read the original novel roughly around the time when I was in middle school (about 18 years ago if I remember correctly). So I more or less went into this film about as blind as anyone who hasn’t read the book. This review will strictly be about the film itself. With all that said, this new film version of A Wrinkle in Time is awful. The only experience I can compare it to right off the top of my head is going to watch David Lynch’s Dune from 1984 without having read the book and shaking your head repeatedly and throwing your hands up in the air in confusion and frustration. I did that a lot watching this wonderful looking but aimless and perplexing waste of 109 minutes.
The best way to summarize the plot is put it this way: Chris Pine plays a scientist who is researching a possible ability to travel light years across the galaxy in an instant. One day, he disappears and it is up to his distraught daughter Meg (Storm Reid), his abnormally smart young son Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe) and Meg’s classmate from school named Calvin (Levi Miller) to join three para-dimensional witches played by Oprah Winfrey, Mindy Kaling and Reese Witherspoon to find Meg’s dad and rescue him from the dark force called the IT.
Even having not read the book in almost two decades I could just feel that this was a sloppy adaptation. It is probably the sloppiest I have seen since The Dark Tower from last year. I honest couldn’t follow what was going on in the story. The movie throws so many story elements, eventful moments and characters at you and none of them really come together into a satisfying whole. Be it the whole thing about Meg’s Dad and Mom discovering something called a Tesseract, Meg’s problems at school, how Charles Wallace knows the witch ladies, Calvin taking a liking to Meg or even as to why Calvin is even on the journey in the first place, the story is uninvolving because there is so much put in within its short running time that there is really nothing to grab your attention.
Instead of taking time and letting the narrative and the characters develop naturally and have the audience join the characters on a journey of discovery through time and space filled with danger and fraught with consequence we get a ton of clumsy exposition dumps (given by several characters but most of them come from the witch ladies and none of them make what is going on any more understandable), irritating lead characters (particularly Charles Wallace with his high pitched voice) and lots of seemingly arbitrary magical happenings that go on in the story because the plot says so (like the Reese Witherspoon witch character talking to flying flowers that speak in color...what?!). I understand that the book is about roughly about 200 pages and so it is stunning that this wasn’t made into at least a 2 ½ hour film to really flesh out all the underdeveloped moments.
The lessons that the story tries to impart on the audience (about how love is a powerful force and family needs to stay together etc.) are rendered moot because there really is no tension or real danger that characters experience during the adventure. Whatever lessons that are learned by the characters don’t feel earned and therefore it is hard to feel any satisfaction as audience members seeing how the characters grow. In fact, apart from Meg, I don’t really recall the characters having any real meaningful development. The start out the way we see them at the beginning and they more or less stay the same by the end.
Speaking of the characters, the performances for the most part are not very good. The only good performances are the ones that came from Storm Reid as Meg and Chris Pine as Meg’s father and they actually had a scene where they reunite that is well acted and was a bit touching. The rest of the actors are really unconvincing. I already mentioned that Charles Wallace was incredibly irritating, the witches chewed their fair share of scenery as annoying para-dimensional fairies…that’s the best way I can describe them and Levi Miller’s Calvin was a blank slate who was not only badly acted but I again couldn’t figure out why he was on the journey. Even Michael Pena’s evil puppet character was just stupid.
The visuals are good looking and the movie is pretty well shot but I as well as many others have said it once and will continue saying it from now until the end of time; the visuals have to be in service of the story and not the other way around. If I don’t understand the narrative, if I don’t want to follow the characters and if I don’t care about what’s at stake, then the film is boring. In the case of this film, it was great looking and boring. Another thing I had a problem with was that this reminded me of a lot of those fantasy films from the 80’s that I could never really get into. You know the kind I am talking about, the kind of fantasy films with a bunch of pixie dust and fairies, characters from a contemporary setting being thrust into a magical world where anything and everything can happen because the plot says so and where the leads are successful not because of any genuine effort on their part but because of some power they discover just in time at the end.
So yeah, this film is one of the most forgettable, confusing and uninvolving time/space travel movies I have seen in quite a while. Disney took a potentially interesting concept and made it dull. This is one that I could nitpick from dusk till dawn but I won’t bother. I strongly recommend skipping this one. If anyone reading this is a fan of the book, chances are you are going to hate this movie. Just stay home and watch something like Time Bandits (1981) by Terry Gilliam. At least that one is funny and is a much better time/space travel movie. If you are looking for something fairly modern, then stay home and watch something like Interstellar (2014). Or if you want something in theaters now, go and see Annihilation as that one earned my highest recommendation and is the best of the year so far.
