A Wrinkle in Time (2018)
After the disappearance of her scientist father,
three peculiar beings send Meg, her brother, and her friend to space in
order to find him.
Director:
Ava DuVernayStars:
Following the discovery of a new form of space travel as well as Meg's
father's disappearance, she, her brother, and her friend must join three
magical beings - Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which - to travel
across the universe to rescue him from a terrible evil.
Country:
USALanguage:
EnglishRelease Date:
9 March 2018 (USA) See more »Also Known As:
Un viaje en el tiempo See more »Box Office
Budget:
$103,000,000 (estimated)Company Credits
Production Co:
Selma director stumbles with a messy adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s much-loved adventure starring Oprah Winfrey.
Quantum
physics crumples in Ava DuVernay’s rainbow bright adaptation of
Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, allowing preteen science geek Meg
(Storm Reid), her crush (Calvin) and her five-year-old genius brother
Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe) to blerp from earth to the screensaver
fantasy-lands at the end of the galaxy in search of her missing father
(Chris Pine). Everything else is shiny and smooth, including the ancient
faces of the three witch-angels who guide the kiddies’ adventure. Mrs
Whatsit, the youngest of the trio at two-billion-years-plus, has gotten
made-over since L’Engle catalogued her thin gray bun and “mouth puckered
like an autumn apple”. Now she looks like Reese Witherspoon – wait, she
is Reese Witherspoon – though it can he hard to tell under her hip-length red locks and pleated ballgown fashioned from pilfered sheets.
That Witherspoon looks like a toga party keg-stand champion befits
DuVernay’s modern vision of a paperback classic bedazzled to within an
inch of its life. (Maybe even closer to death than that – I wouldn’t
want to be within a mile of Oprah Winfrey
when she realizes her sequined eyebrows just look super silly.) The
costumes are at once cluttered and vacuous. The design decree is:
“More!” Mrs Whatsit, Winfrey’s Mrs Which and Mindy Kaling’s Mrs Who are
plated in extravagant ruffles and braids, but their outfits are such a
heedless hot-glue assault, they don’t say a thing about who these
characters individually are. They are glitter dolls flung into a
technicolor void.
Forget the tykes. Winfrey alights in Meg and Charles Wallace’s
backyard as though astrologically assured that she’s the star of the
film. Twice the size of everyone else and with her hair curled into an
interplanetary fleur de lis, she looms and bobs and radiates love upon
all the lesser beings onscreen and in seats. In one scene, a flying
Charles Wallace stretches out a small hand to stroke Winfrey’s cheek. It
feels like the most sincere shot in the movie.
DuVernay’s updated L’Engle is totally for kids. Good. It’s high time
adults between 18 and seven billion loosen their death grip on action
figures and hand children’s entertainment back to children. However,
this Wrinkle in Time doesn’t seem made for the kind of actual, human
children who dogeared the five-paperback series with playground-grimy
nails muttering the words “tesseract” and “liverwurst” to themselves
like mysterious incantations. The film is tentative and over-protective,
as though it’s terrified that a story empowering kids to help good
battle evil could give someone a nightmare. It reduces the whole
universe to one girl’s self-esteem.
As a former girl myself, I remember carrying insecurities that felt
bigger than all the planets combined. There’s truth in confronting the
weak parts of yourself that kids early on learn to hide away, and a
great shot of young Reid with her charming knock-kneed sprint racing to
scream her own worth into the great unknown. L’Engle trusted that kids
were even tougher than that. She wrote with brilliant dispassion. She
wanted young readers to value individualism, but she wasn’t going to
placate tykes into swallowing her ideas like a game of
here-comes-the-airplane. Her themes weren’t coated in a spoonful of
sugar – for chrissakes, she fed characters liverwurst.
There’s no nose-wrinkling meat-pastes here. The film has the feel of an
iPad video pawned off on a toddler so Dad can make comforting mac and
cheese – here’s a bite-sized lesson about loving yourself and a jumble
of pretty colors. Fair enough. A Wrinkle in Time
would look better on a small screen. Most of the shots are close-ups of
the characters’ faces framed so large you can’t see the terrible CG
backdrops behind them, and edited together without intent. Jennifer Lee
and Jeff Stockwell’s script is strung together word-clumps from
characters standing around reciting stiff, informational speeches as
though they beamed in from a video game cutscene. As they chant earnest
thoughts about embracing your faults, the camera continually cuts from
one warm smile to another like an anxious puppy desperate for
reassurance. The entire film maintains that nervous pace. There’s no
room to breathe or think or find your own way into an emotional moment.
By the end, I was so smothered in comfort my teeth were grinding.
A Wrinkle in Time feels like a product molded by a megacorporation
too tense to hand over the factory controls. You can only see DuVernay
carving her initials into the corners of the film, adding deeper layers
to Meg’s insecurity about her curly natural hair, trumpeting her delight
in presenting a young, black, female heroine whose greatest strength is
parabolas. What DuVernay lacks in a grand imagination of the universe –
Wrinkle seems to be scotch-taped from scraps of Alice in Wonderland’s
sentient flower-patch, including a costume change where Witherspoon
transforms into a sexy leaf of kale, and the cruel planet Camazotz
merely looks like a Target commercial in hell – she compensates for with
her clear vision of our own planet. As in the books, Mrs Who prefers to
speak only in famous quotations, but now her nods to the European canon
of Euripides, Dante and Shakespeare has been enlivened with lines from
Outkast and Lin-Manuel Miranda.
“Tomorrow there’ll be more of us,” chimps Kaling, mercifully cutting
the Hamilton lyrics short before the moment gets more awkward. In a film
flattened under the weight of too much more, the line at first sounds
like a threat. But there should be more ambitious sci-fi for kids, with
casts, creatives and crew members so diverse that eventually audiences
won’t even think to comment on them. Hopefully, we’ll have more, and
better, empowering blockbusters for kindergartners to paw on their
flatscreens. DuVernay’s truest vision is that this world – not just our
paths to faraway planets – has to bend.
- A Wrinkle in Time is released in the US on 9 March and in the UK on 23 March
I was thinking about to give 1 star only, but especially the music, which is super epic and most of the time to much overloaded is something what I really like, so I give A Wrinkle In Time 2 Stars but again the story is anything else but good or more worth than 1 star.
Thanks for reading and have fun watching movies.
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