At Fiction Unbound, we love to review our favorite fantasy films, and when they are based on beloved childhood novels, even better! We have already talked about how we felt revisiting Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time books, now it’s time to see what we thought of the most recent film version of this classic fantasy novel. Ava DuVernay directs this incarnation, written by Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell, and starring Storm Reid as brave heroine Meg Murry.
Danyelle C. Overbo - Dazzling in Many Directions, Too Little Focus
Those dang kids and their ball bouncing!
I have to admit to being a little disappointed by the film. I adore the books, and they made a significant mark on me in my childhood, so my hopes were high. A Wrinkle in Time deserved the full Hollywood movie treatment, and it got exactly that. The screen positively lit up with brilliant color and vivid imagery in key scenes, bringing to life parts of the book that I’d always imagined, like the scene with all the children bouncing their red balls in unison. That really thrilled me. I loved that they cast Meg as a girl of color, and I really respect DuVernay’s vision of a more diverse cast than the book originally had. I think the child actors really nailed their parts and could not have asked for a better Meg or Calvin (Levi Miller).
I avoided reading any reviews about the film before seeing it because I didn’t want anything to color my viewing of the movie, but I did see it wasn’t getting a lot of love. When I finally got to see A Wrinkle in Time, I understood why. Granted, the book does make for some difficult subject matter to translate to the silver screen, but it shouldn’t have been this difficult. The story in the novel is simple. Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace are invited to go on an adventure by fantastic beings to save Meg and Charles Wallace’s father. The book explains what a tesseract is and why their father is in danger, having tessered onto a hostile planet. The evil force the children face is a darkness spreading across the universe, and IT on Camazotz is a manifestation of that darkness. In the movie, IT has been named the ultimate evil, responsible for spreading that darkness. Instead of being the horrible thing they face on Camazotz, the film tries to condense and simplify by making IT the ultimate evil.
Someone should have told the screenwriters that they don't let people play on the beach on Camazotz.
I imagine that if you haven’t read the books, this ends up being more confusing than anything else. I’m not sure, but, for me, it definitely took the bite out of the battle with IT. In the books, the children walk together, holding hands, up to this horrifying bureaucratic nightmare building, avoiding all the adults moving in sync, like the children with their balls. When they enter this building, they are faced with the Man with Red Eyes, who mocks them even while offering them sustenance. It is a devilishly frightening scenario, one the film replaces with a weird, brightly colored beach scene. In the books, it’s Charles Wallace’s arrogance at believing he can enter the mind of IT without succumbing that gets him in trouble. In the movie, all it takes is for the Man with Red Eyes to say the multiplication tables. So, so LAME.
This change from the book is a good example of what went wrong with the movie as a whole. They tried to do too much (a colorful beach, a chase, the food that tastes like sand, Charles Wallace taken) and ended up losing sight of the reason for the scene to begin with, thereby robbing it of its impact.
There was a lack of thematic and narrative focus in the film because it felt like the writers were trying to cram in as many different concepts, moments between characters (what was the point of Meg and Calvin riding that tree if not for them to jam in another reason to draw them closer - I guess riding around the cosmos together wasn’t enough), and themes as possible, resulting in a jumbled mess of a story. I loved the addition of Meg fighting off her “ideal self” and accepting herself as she truly is in the end, but it honestly felt a bit tacked-on. And, while the books provide a somewhat subtle message about love being the tool to fight the darkness, the movie just spells it out for the audience, over and over again. I felt like they dumbed down the material for a children’s audience, but why? The material in question is a children’s book. They really didn’t give their audience enough credit. It is worth seeing if you loved the books or if you've got some kids to entertain for a couple hours.
Amanda Baldeneaux: Beauty & Self-Esteem Edge Out Science
Mindy Kaling as Mrs. Who in a pretty rescue mission involving flowers.
“Spectacle” characterizes the film adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time on several fronts. First, the literal spectacle of the film: it’s breathtaking in its visual artistry with leaning towers of antique books, mountains (or moons?) rising in crescents over an alien horizon, sumptuous gems and embroidery (can I write a whole post about the film’s glitter game?), and floating iris-like flowers that speak in colors with their delicate petals. The film itself “speaks” in color, contrasting bright and dark from scene to scene to show the viewer what’s to be gained - and lost - by being a warrior for light.
It’s fitting that I’m typing these thoughts on the spring equinox, a day of balance between light and dark. Tomorrow, the scales will tip, giving way to longer hours of sunlight as the plants and the soil come back to life. Life, and its freedom of choice and to love, are what the three Misses are asking Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace to fight for when they set off to liberate Mr. Murry from IT. Where the film succeeds in showcasing the beauty and power of love - for family, for friends, and for one’s self - it drops the book’s focus on science. The film never shows us Mrs. Murry cooking dinner on a bunsen burner or even Meg explaining how to wrinkle time with a demonstration of string (a cruel tease of the film’s trailer that didn’t appear in the film).
Levi Miller as Calvin who only has eyes for Meg.
We spend more time being told by everyone that Meg is smart than we actually get to see, and that’s a missed opportunity for inspiring young women in the sciences. What we actually see - another iteration of "spectacle" via viewpoint - are boys loving Meg: Charles Wallace defending Meg on the playground, Calvin looking at Meg like I'd imagine Dante looked at Beatrice, Mr. Murry willing to sacrifice Charles Wallace to save Meg from IT. We see Meg use keen observation in a time of crisis in the forest of Camazotz, and we see her visualizing physics (I think?) when she peers through Mrs. Who’s spectacles. Through all of the film’s spectacles and viewpoints, what I really wanted to see, to paraphrase The Martian, was Meg “science the shit” out of everything. I hope in the director’s cut we can see Meg explaining the tesseract, and maybe doing more of the computations and figuring that make her brilliant, in addition to watching her learn to love herself the way her family and Calvin already do.
Sean Cassity: Here are some answers. What were the questions?
When I’m watching a movie drawn from source material I’ve enjoyed and the movie isn’t working for me, I find myself paying close attention to the choices being made. Some books are very cinematic to begin with and lend themselves to a straightforward adaptation. Other books depend more on ideas than action and require more and different choices to be made on their way to becoming a movie. A successful adaptation then becomes more of a conversation between the book and the movie, rather than a filmed transcript of the book. Alex Garland’s script from Jeff VanderMeer’s book Annihilation is a good example of this. That script bypasses many of the main events of the book but captures and enhances the essence of the book so much that I left the theater exhilarated. The job of the movie is not to replicate the experience of the book. It’s to make a good movie. Deviating from the book is only bad when the places the script goes instead are bad. Unfortunately, I can't claim to believe the choices made in this adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time were mostly good.
This version of A Wrinkle in Time seems trapped between wanting to be faithful to the book and also wanting to make a movie you put on 3D glasses for. There is a way to accomplish this, but having everyone stand on one foot on rickety rocks in the Happy Medium’s lair is not it. This scene stars a comedian, but it doesn’t give him an opportunity to be funny, just mildly awkward. The enhancements to the setting of the scene do not comment on the themes or the characters and aren’t really interesting in themselves. I get the feeling there was a note to “add something here” and this is what they came up with. Adding something here isn’t a bad idea at all, it just feels like what was added was arbitrary.
Other choices are just as arbitrary. Why does Mrs. Whatsit become a flying banana leaf instead of a flying centaur? Why are they flying around just as a goof instead of purposefully being taken to glimpse the darkness they must ultimately face? Why does an inconsequential tornado appear to race them to an inconsequential wall just so they can be rescued by the refrigerator gimmick from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? I don’t believe any of Mrs. Who’s quotations from the book survive into the movie and they are replaced with quotes that seem to be have chosen for their brevity rather than their pithiness. These choices always seem to lessen the impact of the book rather than add to it. The kids bouncing balls scene is retained, but it is stripped of its forced conformity dystopia. It is just a weird thing they see which disappears when they leave it behind. The filmmakers wanted the scene but they didn’t want its themes and they didn’t want to replace the lost theme with a new theme.
The most disappointing scene is the meeting with the man with the red eyes. We’re on a crowded beach for some reason. Again, the setting isn’t doing any work except giving us something to look at. I guess because the food tastes like sand so they decided they should just have a lot of sand around in general? But the real disappointment comes in what they do to Charles Wallace here. He is hypnotized and converted into an evil thing with incredibly little resistance. Instead of writing a scene where the kids work together to overcome the darkness and then Charles Wallace willfully, but strategically, succumbs, Charles Wallace’s character and heroism are diminished and the only thing the story gains in its place is maybe a little brevity.
Apparently, Stephen King now owns the right to call your amorphous evil “It,” because instead of calling the dark brain IT as in the book, here everyone refers to it as “The It” to incredibly clumsy results. One positive choice, though, was to represent IT as world of neurons they can walk upon rather than a big brain on a pedestal.
Overall, I felt the script had a genuine distrust of the source material where all the conflicts are resolved through long conversations and a bit of love. And gone is Mrs. Who demonstrating with her skirt how space-time can be wrinkled to travel long distances instantly – a moment which captured so many young minds with the possibilities of physics. In its place, Mr. Murry tells an audience basically, “Hey, you can wrinkle space. I won’t explain what I mean by that, but I will tell you that you can just do it with your mind somehow.”
I really wanted to enjoy A Wrinkle in Time. Those of us who care about representation want movies taking risks in that direction to succeed. At least none of the flaws in A Wrinkle in Time are problems that representation introduced. At a more basic level, it seems it didn’t have the right answers because it was never quite sure what the questions were.
Read Similar Stories
Cadwell Turnbull's new novel — the first in a trilogy — imagines the hard, uncertain work of a fantastical justice.