Review of A Wrinkle in Time (2018) by Mare R — 27 Sep 2018

I held off seeing this in the theater because as a lover of all Madeleine L'Engle's books, the trailer for this movie left me underwhelmed. But I finally decided to give it a chance this week on Netflix.

Sadly, it was even worse than I'd expected. Even with a cast of star actors, it was all just too sappy and cutesy. I'm not usually the person who complains when movies deviate from the books, as I can almost always enjoy each for their own merits.

But in this case, it felt like they took the bare bones of the book and turned it into a falsely bright and goody-goody story that simply didn't do justice to the original in any fashion. Also, I'm a fan of diversity.

I usually don't mind at all when directors take liberties with the source material in order to offer diverse characters. But this was...overkill. It felt like someone (the director? Disney?) was trying to make a point of checking as many cultural/ethnic boxes as possible, even changing Charles Wallace to an adopted child in order to (it felt to me) include yet another diverse character.

Don't get me wrong, the little boy who played Charles Wallace was brilliant. But on top of everything else, it just felt contrived. Overall, the movie was far too floofy and sugary, like the director was afraid the source story wasn't good enough or wouldn't be appealing enough to kids and adults (never mind it's been an award-winning, bestselling classic for decades).

So it had to be prettied up and made to appear visually bright and colorful and magical, like the inside of a candy store. For me...it fell flat and I came away from it thinking it was one of the worst movies I've seen in a good long time.

And I think I would have felt that way even if I had never read the book.