A Wrinkle in Time

Good: Some of the messages and morals of the story are heartfelt for its intended audience of children. The saving grace is Chris Pine. Even though he had a small role, he fit the role perfectly and was not so excessive. The color scheme is very bright and colorful, which makes the movie somewhat interesting, even with the subpar acting and plot.....

Bad: The acting all around is either subar from the cast or over the top from Mindy Kaling and Zach Galifianakis that it comes out unnatural. Even with a good cast consisting of Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon, they did not add much to the movie's benefit. Disney spent so much money on its adult characters that they forgot to hire good child actors/actresses for the child cast members are not even on par with some of the amazing child stars from "Stranger Things," "It," or "Jungle Book."

Overall: The movie is mainly geared towards elementary and middle school children with some adult aspects, yet the movie is childish and not up to Disney's standard. Disney should be embarrassed to have produced such a movie with big Hollywood names and have it bomb. The movie falls flat and lacks humor leading to a failure for Disney. Even though this movie is supposed to be a big statement towards diversity with a colored director helming a $100 million budget project, the movie does not do justice.

2/5

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.

And that was "What the hell did I just watch?" and variations. I haven't read the books, I have no idea what the story was supposed to be, but even so I knew there was something deeply utterly wrong with it. It really felt like the hallucinations of a drugged person trying to make sense of the story behind and failing miserably. It was so bad that I suspected sabotage. Is it that someone intentionally didn't want it to be any good? I know I should attribute to malice what can easily be explained by stupidity, but in this case, it is far from easy.

The only reason I rated it three stars (towards the funny end of the spectrum) is because of its inadvertent humor, best appreciated while drunk or stoned or part of Myst3k. So many scenes seem to hint to other materials: Star Trek, Dr. Who, Neverending Story. Or maybe it was just me trying to make sense of something completely random. A good description for this movie: white noise. A better one: pretty colored noise.

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.