A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

(On TV, August 2020) There are many ways in which A Wrinkle in Time irritates me. It starts, clearly, with not being part of its target audience. This is a film clearly designed to appeal to teenage girls, a group of which I’ve never been part of. But it’s also self-consciously a fantasy film dressed in science-fiction garb, and I’m of the film belief that you have to play by the rules of SF if you’re hanging in its playground. But it doesn’t—by going for science-fantasy babble ever chance it gets. When the film features people scoffing at the protagonist’s theories, it wants me to feel sorry for them, but I’m rather there thinking, “No, this is actually stupid.” (One notes that the original classic YA novel by Madeleine L’Engle had pretty much the same issues, if not worse.) The dialogue can be overly precious at times, the rhythm of the film is very uneven and even the villains can be cartoonish. Despite basic technobabble about quantum entanglement and such, the film really is a fantasy in which a girl travels to the dark kingdom to rescue a loved one. The mismatch between my expectation of the form and the way it’s executed would normally be enough to put me off the result with a broken suspension of disbelief. In many ways, A Wrinkle in Time feels a lot like the similarly disappointing Tomorrowland, leading me to think that they may be something stupid in the water at Disney Studios. But here’s the thing: Despite all of this, I still have quite a bit of affection for the result. Everything else about A Wrinkle in Time is quite likable. I like Storm Reid as the protagonist, and I think we should make many more movies for young girls. I absolutely enjoyed the casting—if going on a death-defying adventure means having Oprah Whitney, Mandy Kaling and Reese Witherspoon as guardian angels, then sign me up. (Witherspoon gets the chance to be very funny along the way.) Even the supporting actors include likable choices such as Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Michael Peña, Zach Galifianakis and Chris Pine. This is definitely the father in myself speaking, but I really liked the overall message of girl empowerment and positive depiction of father/daughter relationships. The ending wraps things up satisfyingly, and director Ava Duvernay clearly shows a mastery of her craft every step of the way. The now de-rigueur wall-to-wall use of colourful CGI leads to spectacular visuals and, as much as we can use this qualifier on a $100M Disney production, the film does seem to have some earnestness to it. It’s true that I wanted to like the film more than I did. On the other hand, A Wrinkle in Time did manage to keep my sympathy despite flaws that would have destroyed most movies with the very same issues. I strongly suspect that a better film would have moved even farther away from the original L’Engle novel, prompting calls as to why it was even an adaptation.