There’s a lot that could be made of A Wrinkle in Time’s multi-racial casting decisions that really hasn’t been, and that’s nice. I think this is the way things should be moving forward — a clear effort toward diversity, but in a movie marketed on its own merit. Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
2/10 They should call this movie A Wrinkle in Bad, because it’s so bad.
A Wrinkle in Time is based on the beloved 1962 young adult novel by Madeleine L’Engle. It follows Meg Murray (Storm Reid), who is tormented at school by classmates and at home by the disappearance of her father, Alex (Chris Pine), four years prior. She and her brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), a powerful psychic, are recruited by Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which (Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling and Oprah Winfrey) to become warriors of the light in an interstellar battle against the darkness, a giant, over-the-top metaphor for both communism and Satan that is responsible for all negative thoughts.
A Wrinkle in Time fails on a basic information transfer level. I have never seen a movie where I have so often found myself wondering what I’m looking at — and I don’t mean the cool physics stuff, which is mostly ignored, I mean characters will jump to the other side of the set from shot to shot. From a basic blocking, who-is-where onstage perspective, I don’t know what’s going on in most of this movie.
Reel Entropy 