A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

Aw man.

Before it came out, I was really rooting for A Wrinkle in Time. I liked the only other film by its director Ava DuVernay that I have seen (it was Selma), and I thought she could do a good job with material like this that needed a stylistic, visionary mind. I also liked some of the cast, and the first time I saw the trailer I was actually quite excited for it.

Yeah, that visionary film I was expecting wasn’t the final product we got. A Wrinkle in Time is a mess. It doesn’t make any profound points, even though it spends every second trying. It also doesn’t tell a coherent story, even though it is from one of the most acclaimed children’s science fiction novels of the past century.

It doesn’t even do the one thing I thought it could for sure achieve: be a visually astonishing film. I don’t think this film looks bad, to be sure, but some of the shot-to-shot editing seems really choppy, especially in dialogue scenes. DuVernay uses a lot of solo close-up shots of actor’s faces that are too claustrophobic and tight which make these simple scenes of conversations feel jerky. A lot of the heavy-CG visual effects shots look good enough, but the points in the film where Oprah’s character Mrs. Which appears as a giant really don’t work.

Part of this might be because these fantastical moments aren’t well-explained by the story; instead, they kind of just happen. There’s very little explanation as to why Mrs. Which is so large in some places but not others or how Reese Witherspoon turns into a giant flying leaf or exactly how Dr. Murry’s concept of traveling through space and time worked. For each of these instances, the film might include a line or two to pass for a reason, but I was never satisfied with any of them. A Wrinkle in Time seems to not trust its audience with any sense of complication, so it tries to dumb down the material. I just wish somebody had realized that doing so actually made the film more confusing to the audience and not less.

This same lack of trust is shown in the film’s chief themes. The novel the film is based on addresses spirituality, oppression, a battle between good and evil, and conformity to the status quo, and it addresses them in very specific ways. Like, I’m talking about quoting the Gospel of John specific. It goes deep and trusts its readers along the way. This film, this film just can’t seem to do that. Instead of being specific, it aims for some vague sense of empowerment that may or may not be spiritual – oddly enough, in a manner similar to one of its star’s former daytime shows – and a vague sense of not being worried about conformity to a standard. It must not think that its audience, young or old, isn’t capable of seeing how its source material uses these things as allegory and not as literal content or religious dogma.

That lack of trust in multiple aspects of the film is ultimately A Wrinkle in Time’s undoing. If it would just take the audience out on a limb every once in a while, it might actually work. It just can’t seem to escape the fact that it is a “Disney film,” which apparently makes it necessary for it to have an impossibly universal appeal. In the process of trying to be broad and applicable to all of humanity, it loses all of the impact it shoots for, ultimately failing to connect deeply with anything.

My recommendation: Skip it.

My grade: 34/100