A Wrinkle in Time Review

If you haven't heard the news recently, Disney is on a mission to take over the world. Pretty soon we might have to rename Earth to Disney World. They already owned Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm. Now they're in the process of purchasing Fox. On top of that, they're on fire with their own live action releases, with the biggest highlights being "Beauty and the Beast" making $1.26 billion worldwide last year and "The Jungle Book" making $966.5 million worldwide the year before. Next year looks to be a huge year for their live action movies with "Dumbo," "Aladdin" and "The Lion King" all on the slate. Then they have "Toy Story 4," "Frozen 2," "Star Wars: Episode IX" and two more Marvel movies with their other branches. Topping things off, they already have dates scheduled for 11-12 movies each year from 2020 to 2022, even though they're not revealing all of the titles yet. But before we get to all of that, we have to make our way through 2018, which has a lot of question marks in pretty much every category for Disney except for on the Marvel front. And they've unfortunately started off on the wrong foot here with the perplexing disaster that is "A Wrinkle in Time." Perplexing because there was a lot of talent that combined together for this pile of dog crap.

In terms of Disney's live action films, this obviously doesn't fall into the category of a live action remake of their own classic property like "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Jungle Book." Rather this is Disney taking a chance on a popular novel that some have claimed is impossible to successfully translate to the big screen. "Challenge accepted," said Disney. So they gave the keys of the car to Ava DuVernay, an extremely popular up and coming director responsible for "Selma" and the popular Netflix documentary "13th," got an all-star cast to jump in the car along with Ava, and together they put the pedal to the metal for this risky adventure... only to drive it straight into a brick wall and watch the whole thing go up into flames, leaving me baffled while watching this disaster, trying to figure out where this all went wrong. Sure, if this was in fact an impossible task to begin with, maybe we point the finger at Disney executives for even trying to make this work by forcing creative minds to solve an unsolvable problem. But even if that was the case, the final product should've been much better than it was as there were basic filmmaking techniques that outright failed across the board and I'm going to do my best to unpack all of this because there's a ton to get to.

First off I want to start by giving the disclaimer that I know nothing about this novel. It's possible that the core problems could lie in the novel. If that's the case, I can't comment. I can only comment on the film that I saw. The initial setup here, at least on paper, is a solid setup. We have two scientist parents played by Chris Pine and Gugu Mbatha-Raw. Chris wants to solve all the mysteries of the universe while Gugu wants to focus on the small things. Solid setup there with potential metaphors that could be used later on. Fast forward four years and Chris has gone missing, causing the life of his daughter, played by Storm Reid, to be rather chaotic. As is often the case with the loss of a loved one, there's a lack of desire on her part to reach her potential. Because of that, her classmates hate and bully her. She struggles with her teachers and her principal. Her relationship with her mom isn't even where it should be. These are solid, real life, emotional problems that could've made for a fascinating first act. And I don't feel it would've taken a whole lot of effort to make that aspect of the film work. A well-written screenplay, great directing and solid acting should've done the trick. With the talent on board, there's no reason to believe that I wouldn't be hooked by this setup.

But that's the problem. I didn't care at all. The whole thing just felt wooden to me. We have a cliche group of bullies who apparently hate Storm Reid. Why? I don't know. They just do. I find the cliche bully character in these grade school dramas to be annoying in the first place, so it's especially bad when these group of girls do a horrible job of selling it. Then as we continue through school, the teachers don't seem to have any apathy for this girl, the principal deserves to earn the award for worst principle and Gugu as the mom gives the most phoned in, lazy performance as Storm's mom. There's no emotion from any characters. The screenplay is lazy and basic. And Storm Reid, bless her heart, is the only actor who seems to care about the movie. She does great. No one else does. Not the teachers. Not the principal. Not the classmates. Not the mom. Not the extremely annoying little brother. Not the boyfriend who's randomly madly in love with her despite like no setup or warning at all. No one. I was rather shocked at this. Storm Reid was the only one that seemed to care about this movie. So then when Reese Witherspoon shows up in their living room one night, I was like, good. Get us out of this boring town. Let's go on a fun adventure through space.

That's when this movie gets weird. I don't know what the plural form of Mrs. is, so I'm just going to use it as is, but we have the three Mrs. that show up. And I'm not even sure what they are. Some sort of masters of the laws of this strange universe. We have Reese Witherspoon as Mrs. Whatsit, Oprah as Mrs. Which and Mindy Kaling as Mrs. Who. Reese is abnormally bubbly in this. I kinda liked her character at certain points and I appreciated the fact that Reese seemed to be having a lot of fun with this role because everyone else seemed bored. Oprah was there to spout out random nuggets of wisdom in a very Oprah-like fashion. She was also a giant hologram for a while and that was strange. Mindy as Mrs. Who is, well, there. I'm not actually sure what her point was. She didn't really do much. I guess the writers of the book and/or screenplay just felt there needed to be a trio of wise ladies, but didn't quite figure out specific roles for all three of them. Why did this trio of ladies show up? Well, to help them find their dad. Chris Pine is out there somewhere and he needs to be rescued. OK. That works for me. Let's go on a crazy space adventure through this bizarre universe and hopefully I can have a bit of fun in the way I have had with previous trippy sci-fi adventures.

Sadly, though, fun is the wrong word to describe this adventure. Boring is probably a better word. And weird. When I watched the trailers for this movie, I had a feeling that this was going to be a trippy film, but I had no idea if it was good trippy or bad trippy. Unfortunately this is bad trippy. I definitely don't mind weird. If we go on random, crazy adventures, I prefer to be fully engaged and have the feeling that I am watching something epic, even if I don't understand what it all means. The most classic example is "2001: A Space Odyssey." That's the strangest movie you'll ever see. But in an epic sort of way. A more recent example is last month's "Annihilation." That's a very strange journey, but it's a layered one with a lot of depth and meaning. With " A Wrinkle in Time," we just did weird for the sake of being weird. There's no rhyme or reason. And there's a bunch of odd rules in place that I highly doubt anyone on this team had any idea what they actually were. It just seemed like they tried to come up with what weird sequence they could come up with next or what random rule to throw out of left field at the audience. And it almost had the feel that they were coming up with everything on the fly as if they started filming before finishing the screenplay.

But at least this was going to be a visually stunning film right? Add in some breathtaking cinematography to make the experience even better where you then have to go find this on the biggest screen possible. And it was like that. Until it wasn't. One moment we'd have a visually stunning film. Then next moment it was painfully obvious that the whole scene was done in a studio with everyone in front of a green screen. Granted, that happens in a lot of films. But in 2018, we have enough technology that even decent filmmakers should easily trick me into thinking the world around them is real. Instead there were moments where it felt about as real as the weather man or traffic man on your local news. The images behind them looked so fake. At these moments, I think I was supposed to be feeling emotion as this story progressed, but I was so distracted by the awful effects that I didn't even care. And I didn't feel bad because Storm Reid was still the only actor in the movie at this point that cared about the project and now it seemed like the visual effects people also didn't care. Did Ava care as she was directing this whole thing? Did the writers care when they attempted to adapt this novel for the big screen? I honestly don't know. It didn't seem like it to me.

And then we have the final problem that just did it in for me. Again, I remind you that I have zero knowledge of this novel. But it felt like there was a lot more to this adventure than was portrayed in this movie. It reminded me of the movie "Eragon" when they took several scenes from the book and combined them into one scene to save time. I don't know how big or small the novel "A Wrinkle in Time" is, but this adventure through the universe felt like it should've been a lot longer because the second act of this movie feels extremely short. We wander around in a field. Take a fly through the sky. Visit a couple of random places. Then we're onto act three. We briefly bump into Zach Galifianakis and Michael Pena along the way, literally for five minutes or less each. Then we're at the finale. It felt like this could've been a 13-episode Netflix series, but what we have instead is the pilot and finale getting the proper time while episodes 2 through 12 get crammed into 20 minutes. The movie clocks in at 11 minutes short of two hours and that's with credits. They gave themselves no time to develop this story. I'd say they should've added 30 more minutes, but with the lack of passion across the board, the 109 minutes as is was excruciatingly painful to get through.

I was going to go really low with my score. But I'm bumping it up a notch for one reason. Chris Pine. We got 90 percent of the way through this movie and up to that point, the only person who cared was Storm Reid and a little bit from Reese Witherspoon, who at least seemed to be having fun. But then when we finally got to Chris Pine, he also showed that he cared about this and there were some genuinely good father/daughter moments that gave me the feels for a few minutes at the end. I still didn't care for the rest of the movie, and there's more atrocities in the form of spoilers that I didn't even get to, but the Chris Pine and Storm Reid moments were solid. But overall, this is still a big no from me. A huge misfire from Disney. I went into this hoping the 42 percent from critics were them just being Grinches to another family film. Instead, I feel that score is too high. And I hate to say it, but I think a good portion of that 42 percent were simply too scared to trash a movie made by a black, female director in 2018. Yes, I want more female and minority directors, too. But they also can make bad movies. It's OK to trash them when it happens. I still love Ava and I hope she recovers from this. But the fact of the matter is she made a really bad movie and I'm giving it a 4/10.