And by "looking forward to this", I mean "tearing apart a movie that took a spray shit all over one of my favorite books from my childhood". Spoilers follow after the jump. You've been warned.
I actually did read A Wrinkle in Time when I was in elementary school and I thought it was absolutely brilliant. The story of Meg Murry going on an adventure alongside her genius brother, a boy she definitely did not have a crush on, and three strange women with astounding powers to go and find her father who went missing some time prior. They go across fantastic landscapes, see wondrous and terrifying creatures, and face an evil that exists beyond the boundaries of human imagination.
It was the first of a series of books in Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quintet, centered around various members of the Murray family and their adventures in the fourth dimension, and it's pretty damn good. The first book in particular is something that could have easily been adapted to the screen...and it was...back in 2003. It wasn't that great. But that was also a much lower budget and lower effort production. While it did have some good points, it wasn't a good representation of the novel. But with Disney doing a major production, a budget of nine digits, oh, they could do something truly great! Oh, yes, they cou-NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
I resisted seeing this movie upon seeing the trailer, it was part of the reason why I've sat on this for as long as I have. The visuals alone raised multiple red flags and told me that this was not a film I wanted to see. And before someone chimes in with "oh, you don't like it because they're not all white!" that isn't the case, I'm talking about the CGI.
And boy was I proven right.
A Wrinkle in Time does start very much like the book, though with a few differences. Meg Murry (Storm Reid) is your average, though clever, middle school student living with her mother Kate (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and her adopted younger brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe). Why is Charles Wallace adopted as opposed to just a blood relative as in the book? So they can have a line about Mr. Murray isn't really his father way later in the movie.
Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and say it - this film actually broke my Rule of Adaptation. It manages to divorce itself so completely from the tone and feeling of the book that it might as well be some sort of separate entity entirely.
But, as in the book, the Murray children make the acquaintance of Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), and Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey). Two of them are too young to be in the role, and the other who is so hilariously misinterpreted by costume design that even Oprah's performance can't save it. This is where, in the book, we also saw the Christian undertones that were so heavily prevalent that are stripped away here - Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which were all angels fighting against evil. Here...they're a bunch of women who dress funny and have magical powers. Now, I'm not asking Disney - especially in this day and age - to go whole hog on Bible-thumping fanaticism, but they go out of their way to make them look completely bizarre and outlandish for the sake of being bizarre and outlandish.
The worst is Mrs. Which. While both Mrs. Whatsit and Mrs. Who have rather ridiculous outfits, Mrs. Which is the only one of the trio that is never clearly seen, seemingly shimmering in and out of the visible spectrum of light as if she were some kind of being that it was impossible for the human mind to fully comprehend. Apparently, the production design decided to translate that to "Oprah being several hundred feet tall and wearing increasingly garish outfits and glittery eyebrows". It's...absolutely ridiculous.
Also accompanying the Murray child is Calvin O'Keefe (Levi Miller), a classmate of Meg's who is definitely not her love interest and they definitely are not married and have a daughter by the fifth book in the series. Also also, you might be wondering (if you're a reader of the books like me) where the Twins - Sandy and Dennys - are. I have no idea. They're never mentioned. Sure, they weren't exactly main characters in the first book, but they were mentioned and are members of the family and did have a book of their own later in the series, so them not being included feels completely bizarre.
But the ladies Whatsit, Who, and Which take Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace on an epic adventure first to the planet Uriel where Mrs. Whatsit turns into a gigantic CGI lettuce dragon and...it was about at this point that I just stopped and stared at the screen for several minutes, wondering if I had somehow dropped acid when I wasn't paying attention. Said dragon doesn't happen at all in the book, by the way. But the children are introduced to a dark cloud - the Black Thing - which is moving through the universe at the alarming rate of...very...very slowly.
Yeah, this film really doesn't do enough to play up the menace of the big bad. It's really depressing, especially when the design they eventually give to IT is just spot on and is one of the very, very few things I can praise about this movie.
But after leaving Uriel, the group travels to the planet of the Happy Medium. In the book, she was a mysterious woman who lived on a complete neutral planet - thus reaching a literal happy medium - and had unparalleled powers of seering. Here...she's suddenly become Zack Galifianakis and is considerably more neurotic in a gigantic "what the hell were you even thinking?!" moment. There, they learn that the Meg and Charles Wallace's father, Alex (Chris Pine) is alive and stuck on the planet Camazotz.
Stuck there after Meg's will to find him overrides the power of the three angels, Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin must confront the dangers of the planet to find him and rescue him...Meg having to learn to believe in herself and use the power of love to save the day.
...which was done far better in the book and with far, far less blunt force trauma.
Meg had some self-confidence issues in the book, but in the book her believing in herself was more her having to accept that her father wasn't capable of doing everything and that she occasionally had to get her hands dirty herself to get things done. Since the film removes that particular conflict, it isn't really brought up, which is kind of a shame.
In the few bits of praise I can give this movie, there are fairly good performances from Storm Reid and Deric McCabe. McCabe in particular gets Charles Wallace spot-on, especially during the Camazotz scenes. Definitely pulls off the young genius child meets Children of the Corn vibe, so kudos there. I also don't completely hate Chris Pine's performance as Mr. Murphy. While he is thirty-eight at the time of this writing, I still think he at least looks too young to play the role, much like with Mrs. Whatsit and Mrs. Who.
The production design is, as I've said, all over the place. The most horrific offenders are the outfits of the Mrs. Ws, but it goes further than that. The CGI choices in places are odd, the designs for places like Camazotz psuedo-follow the book, but then zig-zag in some odd ways, and then you have the design of IT, which is absolutely brilliantly done. If the effort that had been put into IT had been in the rest of the film, then I wouldn't have to trash this film so much.
How Tessering works is done completely differently as well, not having anything to do with effort or knowledge, but it's all about self-belief and force of will. It's part of Meg's arc...if you can call it that. In reality, it's really just things that happen and at the end she discovers the power of the Glow and learns the true meaning of Christmas or whatever.
I know I might seem like I'm rushing to my conclusion and it's only because I am. Beyond just the poor design and poor plot choices, the film also suffers in the post-production department as well. The music choices are way off and besides the lettuce dragon scene...it's not really fitting. For example, when Meg goes up a stairwell to find her father while in CENTRAL Central Intelligence, you would imagine that something ominous or foreboding would be playing. Something that would perfectly set the tone of being in the belly of a beast, facing down the minions of an unknowable evil that seeks only to destroy you and all that you love.
Instead, we get some incredibly shitty pop number that completely ruins the moment.
I know that you're Disney, Disney, but c'mon.
To be less than brief, if my entire review up to this point hasn't made it clear - I strongly dislike this movie. I've praised the few things that I can praise, but the thing is bogged down in bad casting, bad design choices, bad scoring choices, and being so divorced from its source material that it might as well be some sort of deranged serial killer wearing its skin.
But there are some that would cry "but it's so diverse!". Oh, yes. It is diverse. The first major motion picture with a nine figure budget to be directed by a woman of color! How lovely! A largely diverse cast! Marvelous! Could you have, perhaps, given them something significantly better to work with? This film bombed when it came out and, frankly, I'm glad that it did. It took the bare bones of the original book (taking out the conflict between Meg and her father late in the plot utterly ruins it), completely ignored it, and did very little with the changes it did make to actually try to make the story that they wanted to tell any good.
Maybe Disney will take the lessons this failure taught to heart when they try to do a reboot in a decade or two...but I really doubt it.
I really, really, really doubt it.
I also pray that I never have to see something this absolutely terrible ever again.
But I really, really, really doubt it.
A Wrinkle in Time is brought to us by the Walt Disney Motion Picture Company and is available wherever movies are sold.
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