A Wrinkle in Time

I'm always in favor of a good lesson for kids wrapped in an adventure, no matter how out there it might be. The astral travel in A Wrinkle in Time is where teen Meg (Storm Reid) must go through a portal to find her scientist father. He's been gone for 4 years, having discovered that portal as physicist and entered it, foolish dad to abandon family just to go where no man has ever gone before.

Unfortunately, Meg's coming of age as she travels with wunderkind little brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), and high school chum Calvin (Leo lookalike Levi Miller), never involves defining challenges but rather just murky CGI and an evil force straight out of Arrival's Rorschach alien. While we hear about her need to have more confidence and be more aggressive, when she finally achieves those, the film is almost over, and the transforming beats are not obvious anyway.

Even the "Which's" interstellar guides, play by Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Mindy Kaling, are unimpressive personalities with equally unimpressive costumes. While they might be a cross between the benign Glinda of Oz and the three witches of Shakespeare on Prozac, they are not seminal to Meg's development or the plot's.

I can advise Oprah to slink back to her kingdom and Pine to go back to his starship. As for you, audience, I advise you to avoid this clunker and see The Shape of Water. No, that's not kids' stuff, but maybe that's all for the good. As Oprah's Mrs. Which intones, "Trust nothing." Trust not this film to do justice to Ms. Lengle's original.

I ignored the bad reviews and went anyway. Disappointing is probably an understatement. This movie is a disaster. Not only is the acting incredibly awful, especially from some otherwise accomplished cast members, but the original storyline was all but abandoned. I read the book several times, and even I was confused what was going on in this film. There was no explanation for any of the concepts, character development was nonexistent, special effects were plentiful but meaningless. The most fascinating parts of the book were eliminated, or only presented so quickly that it was difficult to understand why they were happening and how they related to the story. This movie could have been SO great - there was incredible potential here, and Disney and the director literally wasted it all.

Wow, I am so disappointed in Disney right now. I was expecting so much from this, but sadly it was absolutely terrible! The movie and acting was so cheesy and cliché, I couldn't help but cringe throughout the movie. Chris Pine deserves a much better role than this, especially after his great performance in Wonder Woman. I mean, how could Disney release this kind of rubbish? Did they even watch it before they release it? Did the director even try? 'Cool' visual effects that made the film look like a compilation of advertisements DOES NOT equal to a good movie! Wow.

By the time "Wrinkle" reached its climactic scenes, where the stakes are highest and the resolution hangs in the balance, it carried so much forward momentum that I had to keep waking myself up so I wouldn't snore and bother the other theater patrons.

Yeah...it was like that.

Look, I'll admit: I've never read the book (shame on me, I guess, as a lifelong lover of SF and general metaphysical weirdness), so I can't judge DuVernay's "A Wrinkle In Time" as an adaptation of L'Engle's literary favorite. But I CAN measure it as a film that wants to tell a story, and on that scale...um...

...

Uy. Never is there a real sense of conflict with which to engage: the tone and mood are so lovey-dovey, from stem to stern, that the film never feels like it's progressing in any meaningful way. The galaxy-gobbling threat doesn't, and isn't. Good performers are wasted on one-note characters (be they whimsical space-nymphs or oh-so-precious baby geniuses) in puzzling costumes and -- were those hairdos? I think they were hairdos. I mean, they were where hair is supposed to be. Expensive FX fill the screen in service to a plot that *drifts* through its paces instead of *advancing*. If there was variance in the musical score, I missed it (but I think I didn't, because I think there wasn't). Michael Peña is asked to leave his "Ant-Man" charm at home and put on a goofy mustache and some red contacts for like a few minutes, and Captain Kirk (the new one, anyway) has a beard and is interesting, but doesn't really do anything and OPE what nope I'm awake not snoring sorry no.

This is going to be someone's favorite movie, and that's a beautiful thing; art needn't be categorically *good* to be *effective*, after all, and I love the hell out of "Xanadu", so I should know. But a film that wants to tell a story should be equipped to tell a story, and if it can't do that, then...it's doing something else, I dunno, I'm...

...

...huh? No, no, I was just...just resting my eyes. It's nice, maybe you should do the same.

This movie has nothing to do with the books I enjoyed as a child. In fact it was so poorly adapted that to even call it A Wrinkle in Time is an insult to the original book. If only I could fold time and go backwards to get my 2 hours back and the $$ it cost!! Save your money and your time it's not even worth renting!