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"A Wrinkle In Time," about three children and three magical beings trying to locate a missing physicist and stop evil from overwhelming the universe, is as dislocated from the current moviegoing moment as its human heroes are from their lives back on earth. It's a gentle fantasy, seemingly pitched at younger children, that would rather take people by the hand than punch them on the shoulder, and that's a good thing; in fact, it's the wellspring of the movie's best qualities. There's a lot here that feels insufficiently shaped or fitfully realized, but at the same time, there's a lot to like. It's the Platonic ideal of a mixed bag. The newness of the new parts counterbalances the ineffectiveness of the stuff that seemingly every fantasy blockbuster does, and that this one doesn't do well. "A Wrinkle in Time" has zero interest in seeming cool, and in its final third, it ramps up the sentiment into a zone that most big-budget movies don't dare enter in the era of irony and "grittiness."  

The story begins with Meg Murry ( Storm Reid ) and her six-year-old adopted brother Charles Wallace ( Deric McCabe ), and their scientist mother Kate ( Gugu Mbatha-Raw ) in a state of mourning over the disappearance of the family patriarch, Alex Murry ( Chris Pine ). The family was baffled by his sudden vanishing, but it turns out to be connected to his research (with Kate) into tesseracts, a phenomenon that allows for the folding of space and time. With help from three magical beings, the goofball Mrs. Whatsit ( Reese Witherspoon ), the regal Mrs. Which ( Oprah Winfrey ) and the wise Mrs. Who ( Mindy Kaling ), the kids leave their world to find Alex, bringing Meg's crush object, Levi Miller's Calvin O'Keefe, along with them. As they travel to a series of galactic locales to free Alex from the grip of dark forces, young Charles Wallace, a prodigy who at times evokes that little kid from " Looper " with the thundercloud eyes, undergoes a terrifying change. 

The film's tone is so radically earnest at certain points—particularly when it's dealing with loss and disappointment—that the movie's logo could be a gigantic ear of corn. In its multicultural casting, its child-centric story, and its emphasis on the validity of feelings, it's so different from every other recent big-budget live-action fantasy (superhero films included) that its very existence amounts to a contrarian statement. Much of the emotional heavy lifting is done by the daughter-father team of Reid and Pine. Pine has stealthily become one of the most versatile leading men in American movies, and one of the few who can channel that old-fashioned, George-Bailey-having-a-breakdown-at-the-bar brand of emotionally vulnerable masculinity without seeming as if he's just doing a bit. Like the rest of the core cast, he's doing old-movie style, just-plant-your-feet-and-say-the-lines acting that seems to be pretending that the Method never happened. Reid in particular is quite good at this; some of the notes she strikes early on reminded me of Elizabeth Taylor in "National Velvet" in their near-theatricality, but in a scene with Pine near the end, the facade drops, and it's devastating. You think about how strong this girl had to pretend to be, how impervious to pain, and how it was all for show: a survival mechanism.

The problem is that the minute the film earns our trust and guides us into the story, what it has to show us isn't all that remarkable: mostly a lot of nondescript glittering/pulsing/stretching/bursting CGI, of the sort that you'd see in a substandard Marvel film (there's even a creature that looks like a flying cabbage leaf). This is made impressive more by the characters' reactions than to anything that's onscreen. It also suffers from trying to do too much in its relatively slight 109-minute running time (the source novel Madeline L'Engle has been considered un-adaptable since its first publication in 1962, so it's possible that even a miniseries might've had issues; the 2003 TV movie was a train wreck). And there are times when director Ava DuVernay (" Selma ") and screenwriters Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell  have trouble smoothly shifting between the film's various modes, which run the gamut from doomed love story to coming-of-age romance to knockabout comedy to high-minded philosophical odyssey. I wish that DuVernay had given Pine and Mbatha-Raw more scenes. And I wish she'd asked more of Winfrey, who's effortlessly regal but doesn't do much here besides make pronouncements; Kaling, a charming presence who's stuck in a part with dialogue consisting entirely of quotes by great poets and thinkers; and Witherspoon, who's agreeably dotty but never ascends to that Glinda, Good Witch of the North plane she could easily reach were she so inclined. But this is more a matter of wishing the film had done more of what it was doing already than wishing it had done something else. 

"A Wrinkle in Time" arrives in theaters during the same week that U.S. viewers observed the 50th anniversary of the premiere of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood,"  a beloved series that was all about respecting the space, the wishes, and the feelings of others. There are many points in "A Wrinkle in Time" where the characters' journeys suggest a big-budget CGI version of that show's regular excursions into "The Neighborhood of Make-Believe," a world in which kindhearted children and adults have poker-faced conversations about insecurity, loneliness, anger, and other mental states openly, amongst themselves and with sock puppets, then return to the "real" world and watch a musical performance or visit a harmonica factory. 

In that spirit, Mrs. Whatsit just shows up in the family's house, less like a real-life neighbor than a scatterbrained wood sprite from a Disney Channel cartoon, and the mom is the only character who seems shocked. Mrs. Which is a 40-foot tall shimmering apparition looming over a backyard during her first appearance, and the onlookers seem more intrigued than terrified by her, as if this kind of thing happens a lot. Meg asks her new maybe-beau Calvin to join her in her time-space journey, and he agrees as readily as if she'd asked him to join her on a walk to the local 7-Eleven. It's the kind of movie where you decide to do something and just go do it, and where no questions are off limits because everyone's so thoughtful. I bet Mister Rogers would have enjoyed it. 

If you laughed derisively at that line, you shouldn't see "A Wrinkle in Time." If it made you smile, go. 

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

Rated PG for thematic elements and some peril.

109 minutes

Oprah Winfrey as Mrs. Which

Reese Witherspoon as Mrs. Whatsit

Mindy Kaling as Mrs. Who

Storm Reid as Margaret "Meg" Murry

Zach Galifianakis as The Happy Medium

Chris Pine as Dr. Alexander "Alex" Murry

Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Dr. Katherine "Kate" Murry

Michael Peña as The Man with Red Eyes

Levi Miller as Calvin O'Keefe

Deric McCabe as Charles Wallace Murry

André Holland as Principal Jenkins

• Ava DuVernay

Writer (based upon the novel by)

• Madeleine L'Engle
• Jennifer Lee
• Jeff Stockwell

Cinematographer

• Tobias A. Schliessler
• Spencer Averick
• Ramin Djawadi

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Review: ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ Gives a Child of the Universe Powerful Friends

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By A.O. Scott

• March 7, 2018

What I remember most about “A Wrinkle in Time” is my second-grade teacher crying over the final pages during read-aloud time, along with nearly everyone else. I suspect some variant of this experience is common among readers who grew up any time since 1962, when Madeleine L’Engle’s beloved science-fiction coming-of-age novel was first published.

The movie adaptation, directed by Ava DuVernay from a screenplay by Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell, has been a long time coming , and it arrives in theaters buoyed by and burdened with expectations. It is the first $100 million movie directed by an African-American woman, and the diversity of its cast is both a welcome innovation and the declaration of a new norm. This is how movies should look from now on, which is to say how they should have looked all along. Fans of the book and admirers of Ms. DuVernay’s work — I include myself in both groups — can breathe a sigh of relief, and some may also find that their breath has been taken away.

Mine was, once or twice, though I would describe the overall experience as satisfaction rather than awe. “A Wrinkle in Time,” faithful to the affirmative, democratic intelligence of the book, is also committed to serving its most loyal and susceptible audience. This is, unapologetically, a children’s movie, by turns gentle, thrilling and didactic, but missing the extra dimension of terror and wonder that would have transcended the genre. Thankfully, though, Ms. DuVernay has dispensed with the winking and cutesiness that are Hollywood’s preferred ways of pandering and condescending to grown-ups. The best way to appreciate what she has done is in the company of a curious and eager 10-year-old (as I was fortunate enough to do). Or, if you’re really lucky, to locate that innocent, skeptical, openhearted version of yourself.

Anatomy of a Scene | ‘A Wrinkle in Time’

The director ava duvernay narrates a sequence from her film featuring storm reid, reese witherspoon, oprah winfrey and mindy kaling..

Hi, I’m Ava DuVernay, the director of “A Wrinkle in Time.” [music] So at this point in “A Wrinkle in Time,” this is Meg’s first world. So she’s just hopped to her first planet. And one of the reasons why I really wanted to do this movie was just the very image of a girl of color traversing through the universe, having these adventures. In this moment Meg Murry — played by my great leading lady Storm Reid — she’s being asked to talk to flowers. Because everyone knows that flowers are the best gossipers in the universe. And one of the things about the design of this is I wanted it to feel like our characters were in a world that was somewhat real, but somewhat animated. So I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t hyper-real. We’re not trying to make everything look real. We like the fact that the flowers have a bit of a cartoon quality. I always wanted to step inside a cartoon. So this is basically Meg stepping inside of it. Here Mrs. Whatsit — played by Reese Witherspoon — turns into creature Whatsit. And this is a big change from the book. In the book, creature Whatsit is a centaur — half woman, half horse. What we wanted to do is update Madeleine L’Engle’s beautiful work in “A Wrinkle in Time” — the author — and create something that hadn’t been seen before. Because we’ve seen centaurs on screen. So we created this beautiful leaf-like creature who pulls from the environment. And creature Whatsit now looks like this. [music] And this quote by Mrs. Who — played by Mindy Kaling — Dang. And observed by Oprah Winfrey as Mrs. Which — is another update to Madeleine L’Engle’s work to create a new vision of “A Wrinkle in Time.” Oh. Woo-hoo.

The story comes with a heroine who makes such identification easy. Meg Murry is a smart, hurt and very real-seeming middle school student played with wonderful solemnity by Storm Reid. Meg’s father (Chris Pine), a brilliant and ambitious scientist, has disappeared, leaving behind Meg; her brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe); and their mother (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who is also a brilliant and ambitious scientist.

The parental partnership, an intellectual romance and a romance between intellectuals, is conveyed with graceful efficiency in the first part of the movie, which also sketches Meg’s predicament. As she grieves for her father and wonders where he went, she also contends with the usual early adolescent afflictions and anxieties. Her grades are slumping, her classmates tease her, and neither the principal (André Holland) nor her mother seem to understand what she is going through.

The frustrations and injustices of youth can feel as vast as the cosmos. In Meg’s case, they literally are. Her father didn’t just run off, he “tessered,” slipping into a distant part of the universe to prove a hypothesis about space, time and consciousness that he and his wife had developed together. Now he is lost, and everything is threatened by a malevolent force known as the IT (not to be confused with the malevolent force in the movie “It”), which lives on a planet called Camazotz.

Tesser, by the way is the verb form of “tesseract,” a phenomenon rendered more poetically by the movie’s title. That and a good deal more is explained by Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which, three astrophysical principles who take the earthly forms of Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling and a literally bigger-than-life Oprah Winfrey. Mrs. Whatsit is a flame-haired, slightly scatterbrained chatterbox. Mrs. Who is an edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations come to life, offering wisdom gleaned from the likes of Rumi, Shakespeare and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Mrs. Which offers her own brand of affirmation, guidance and tough love, encouraging Meg to find and become her best self and to be a warrior for good against the forces of darkness. In other words: Oprah Winfrey. With glittering makeup and shimmering armor.

The special effects are pretty wild, though not always as overpowering as the gasps and exclamations of the characters might indicate. The flying flowers on the planet Uriel are sublime, the spectacle of Ms. Witherspoon transformed into an airborne cabbage less so. In any case, Meg and Charles Wallace, accompanied by a sweet boy named Calvin (Levi Miller), who has a crush on Meg, tesser off in search of their dad, finding picturesque planets and Zach Galifianakis as a grumpy guru called the Happy Medium. It’s fairly mellow fun until the Mrses take their leave and the youngsters must face the terrors of Camazotz and the IT on their own.

At this point, the images become sharper, scarier and more austere, and the emotions more intense. The warmth that is Ms. DuVernay’s calling card encounters a Kubrickian chill as the power of the IT starts to mess around with Meg’s mind and Charles Wallace’s personality. The worst part of the adventure is the best part of the movie, and it’s over a little too soon.

Like Mrs. Which and her colleagues, “A Wrinkle in Time” is demonstratively generous, encouraging and large-spirited. Though it is full of bright colors and passages of visual dazzle, it trusts words more than images, spelling out messages about love, courage and self-acceptance with the conscientious care of a teacher reading aloud to a class. (It also makes canny use of music, both Ramin Djawadi’s score and songs from of-the-moment pop and hip-hop artists.) Nobody will miss the lessons of the movie, and they are fine and timely lessons. Those who take them most to heart will find their way back to Madeleine L’Engle.

A Wrinkle in Time Rated PG. Evil in the universe. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes

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• Cast & crew
• User reviews

A Wrinkle in Time

After the disappearance of her scientist father, three peculiar beings send Meg, her brother, and her friend to space in order to find him. After the disappearance of her scientist father, three peculiar beings send Meg, her brother, and her friend to space in order to find him. After the disappearance of her scientist father, three peculiar beings send Meg, her brother, and her friend to space in order to find him.

• Ava DuVernay
• Jennifer Lee
• Jeff Stockwell
• Madeleine L'Engle
• Oprah Winfrey
• Reese Witherspoon
• 697 User reviews
• 281 Critic reviews
• 53 Metascore
• 5 wins & 17 nominations

• Mrs. Whatsit

• Charles Wallace

• Happy Medium

• Principal Jenkins

• Veronica Kiley

• Camazotz Woman

• Elegant Man
• Mrs. Teacher

• Mr. Teacher

• Calvin's Father
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia Over the entrance to Mrs. Who's (Mindy Kaling's) house is a street-number sign with the eight hanging lopsided, forming an infinity symbol.
• Goofs In several scenes, Meg's glasses do not have any lenses in them.

Dr. Alex Murry : What if we are here for a reason. What if we are part of something truly divine.

• Crazy credits The Walt Disney Pictures logo is affected by a tesseract.
• Connections Featured in 75th Golden Globe Awards (2018)
• Soundtracks Let Me Live Written by Denisia "Blu June" Andrews, Brittany "Chi" Coney, Ali Payami , and Kehlani (as Kehlani Parrish) Produced by Nova Wav and Ali Payami Performed by Kehlani Courtesy of Tsunami Mob/Atlantic Recording Corp.

User reviews 697

• emjay-45612
• Mar 18, 2018
• How long is A Wrinkle in Time? Powered by Alexa
• March 9, 2018 (United States)
• United States
• Disney Plus
• Official Site
• Nếp Gấp Thời Gian
• Wanaka, Otago, New Zealand
• Walt Disney Pictures
• Whitaker Entertainment I
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $100,000,000 (estimated)
• $100,478,608
• $33,123,609
• Mar 11, 2018
• $132,675,864

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 49 minutes

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‘a wrinkle in time’: film review.

'A Wrinkle in Time,' Ava DuVernay's adaptation of the classic children's novel, boasts a starry cast including Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling and Chris Pine.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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Only the faintest glimmers of genuine, earned emotion pierce through the layers of intense calculation that encumber Ava DuVernay’s   A Wrinkle in Time . Disney’s lavish adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s fantastical 1962 book (there were four sequels) about a girl’s journey through multiple dimensions to find her long-missing father may provide enough distractions to keep kids in the lowest double-digits age range interested. All the same,  DuVernay’s first big-budget studio extravaganza after breaking through with Selma and the great documentary 13th feels cobbled together with many diverse parts rather that coalesced into an engaging whole. Even if this is widely consumed by the target audience, it doesn’t charm or disarm.

The film centers on 13-year-old Meg (Storm Reid), who has a black mother ( Gugu Mbatha-Raw ), a white father (Chris Pine) — the latter a scientist who’s been missing for four years — and a mixed-race 6-year-old adopted brother, Charles Wallace ( Deric McCabe). Then there’s the trio of benevolent, diverse and other-worldly overseers ( Oprah Winfrey , Reese Witherspoon , Mindy Kaling ) who evidently have nothing better to do wherever they come from than to facilitate Meg’s inter-galactic search for her dad and to utter endless self-esteem-raising platitudes like “You can do this!” and “You are a warrior!”

Release date: Mar 09, 2018

Although Meg is very bright, like everyone else in her family, she hasn’t been the same since Dad disappeared. Little Charles Wallace, who’s always referred to by both names, is a real smarty pants (he has all the best lines, and McCabe does a nice job with them) and exasperates Meg. Meg also has an ever-attentive and cute would-be boyfriend, Calvin (Levi Miller).

When the three women — Mrs. Which (Winfrey), Mrs. Whatsit (Witherspoon) and Mrs. Who ( Kaling ) — suddenly materialize much in the manner of the Good Witch from the North in you-know-what, Meg is enlightened about the existence of something called the tesser , a warp in time and space that might enable her to find her father on the other side, where he’s suspected to be trapped. Charles Wallace and Calvin are not about to be left behind, and so the journey begins.

What comes thereafter is, unfortunately, not anywhere nearly as eventful, enchanting or musically beguiling as its old Hollywood precursor. The challenging events facing the inter-galactic explorers, both stemming from the book and dreamed up by scenarists Jennifer Lee (Disney’s screenwriting queen ever since Frozen ) and Jeff Stockwell ( The Bridge to Terabithia ), mostly feel rote, arbitrary rather than organic and, in the end, uninteresting; when in doubt, they always find another platitude.

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Why 'a wrinkle in time' is the movie girls of color need (guest column).

The three “Mrs.” characters, who change makeup and wardrobe styles incessantly, are unequally balanced: Witherspoon has far more dialogue and screen time than the others and before long becomes annoyingly overbearing; Winfrey kind of floats through much of it making banal pronouncements, such as, “If we do not act soon, darkness will fall across the universe”; and  Kaling has unfairly little to say or do.

The film is most tolerable when it remains centered on the three kids, their bickering and their underlying “there for you” inter-dependency. Meg is appealing because you know that behind her reticence lies a smart and resourceful girl who will one day be able to fully assert herself without having to be told every five minutes that, “You just have to have faith in who you are.” Calvin remains too blandly “nice” to be an interesting character but fills the bill as eye candy for younger teen girls, while Charles Wallace is, by the film’s modest standards, something of a hoot as the preternaturally sharpest kid in the neighborhood, be it on Earth or elsewhere.

As the pic jumps from one unidentified world to another, there are certainly sights to behold — a flying dragon, weird and gorgeous landscapes, the Mrs.’ constant makeup and wardrobe changes and an encounter with a character played by Zach Galifianakis whose utterances are about as amusing his name, Happy Medium. But after impressing so with her earlier work both in features and documentaries, what’s disconcerting here is DuVernay’s inability to forge a strong or supple visual style. Most scenes are dominated by far too much cutting between shots that bear no spatial relationships to one another, to the point where the compositions look arbitrary; it all seems manufactured rather than crafted, with scenes played and over-edited to visually busy but indifferent effect.

As a result, one’s engagement with the likeable enough characters starts flagging in the final third as the air escapes the balloon. On top of that, the bromides about the primacy of family and being true to yourself are signaled, but not earned.

Production company: Whitaker Entertainment Distributor: Buena Vista Cast: Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling , Storm Reid, Levi Miller, Deric McCabe, Gugu Mbatha-Raw , Michael Pena, Zach Galifianakis , Chris Pine, Andre Holland, Rowan Blanchard Director: Ana DuVernay Screenwriters: Jennifer Lee, Jeff Stockwell , based on the novel by Madeleine L’Engle Producers: Jim Whitaker, Catherine Hand Executive producers: Doug Merrifield , Adam Borba Director of photography: Tobias Schliessler Production designer: Naomi Shohan Costume designer: Paco Delgado Editor: Spencer Averick Music: Ramin Djawadi Visual effects supervisor: Rich McBride Casting: Aisha Coley

Rated PG, 110 minutes

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Film Review: ‘A Wrinkle in Time’

Less than a month after 'Black Panther,' Ava DuVernay's fantasy tentpole makes strides for representation, while botching key aspects of the beloved Madeleine L'Engle novel.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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Three years before Madeleine L’Engle died, ABC butchered and then broadcast an adaptation of her best-known book, “ A Wrinkle in Time ,” giving the author a chance to finally see her visionary 1962 story — overflowing with characters, creatures and ideas that defy visual representation (just try to draw a tesseract, if you can) — translated to the screen. Asked by Newsweek what she thought of the made-for-TV version, L’Engle coolly told her interviewer, “I expected it to be bad, and it is.”

Expectations can be a funny thing when it comes to movies: The more eagerly we anticipate a project, the more likely it is to disappoint. When Disney resolved to remake “Wrinkle,” this time with a much bigger budget, a better director ( Ava DuVernay , fresh off “Selma”) and the benefit of a quantum leap forward in visual effects technology, fans of the novel had every reason to hope the studio might get it right. Plus, there was the added excitement of seeing a woman of color take the helm of a big tentpole.

Let this be a warning: Keep your expectations in check, and you might be pleasantly surprised. Despite such bold choices as casting Oprah Winfrey as an all-wise celestial being and rejecting the antiquated assumption that the lead characters ought to be white, “A Wrinkle in Time” is wildly uneven, weirdly suspenseless and tonally all over the place, relying on wall-to-wall music to supply the missing emotional connection and trowel over huge plot holes.

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Juggling so many extreme look changes it comes off feeling like a tacky interstellar fashion show at times, the film hops from one planet to the next too quickly for us to grow sufficiently attached to adolescent heroine Meg Murry (Storm Reid) or invested in her quest to find her missing father (Chris Pine), a scientist who disappeared four years earlier just as he thought he’d found a breakthrough means of traveling great distances through space via something called a tesseract. That term, like so much of the vocabulary in L’Engle’s book, asks children to reach beyond their reading level to follow a story that projects Meg from the comfort of her suburban backyard to worlds where entities feel and communicate in radically different ways — a mind-expanding invitation for empathy, if ever there was one.

On this level, DuVernay and screenwriter Jennifer Lee (“Frozen”) do right by the source material. Though they simplify many concepts to work within the new medium, they haven’t dumbed down the whole. Meg remains a somewhat nerdy character, effectively defined by her insecurities (she’s tormented by a popular girl in her class, whom the film shrewdly reveals to have self-image issues of her own). To fulfill her quest, she must learn to recognize and embrace her faults.

If Meg is smart, her adopted younger brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), may well be a genius — or at the very least, a prodigy whose gifts will soon be coveted by an evil force called “the Black Thing,” or simply “It.” (For the record, L’Engle got to that particular pronoun two dozen years before Stephen King.)

When an odd, redheaded woman named Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon) shows up at the Murry home late one night, Charles Wallace is the least alarmed. He’s also the one who encourages Meg and her supportive friend Calvin (Levi Miller) to barge into a creepy house, where they find Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling) napping among the artfully stacked piles of books (the character is like a walking Barlett’s Familiar Quotations, communicating exclusively in other people’s words).

Last to arrive is Mrs. Which (Winfrey, an inspired casting choice), the eldest and most powerful of these incredibly special, diva-liciously over-dressed women. Though Charles Wallace is too young to remember their missing dad, he’s the first to “tesser” — exploiting a fold in the fabric of time to jump through space — after Mrs. Which explains the concept.

Finding their father may be the kids’ driving goal in the film, but it’s the inter-dimensional tourism that makes their mission worthwhile. The first planet they come to is inhabited by sentient plants that have mastered the secrets of levitation and that “speak color” (a fun idea somewhat unsatisfyingly explained here). With emerald-green fields and crystal water as far as the eye can see, this world is home to Mrs. Whatsit, who makes a transformation we haven’t seen before, whisking them away on a unique kind of magic carpet ride.

From there, it’s off to a distressingly ugly place where the characters teeter on giant gemstones while a goofy hermit (Zach Galifianakis) cracks jokes. The visual effects are so poor during this stretch that it leaves the actors looking ridiculous as they pinwheel their arms in an exaggerated pantomime of trying not to lose their balance. The most relatable performer in an ensemble of wildly different acting styles, Reid struggles to convey Meg’s lack of confidence in herself, when it’s clear these doubts exist only to delay a sudden climactic swell of self-acceptance — which will happen at their next stop, on Camazotz, a land where It is so powerful that the Mrs. Ws must leave them.

Like so many of the artistic decisions in “A Wrinkle in Time” (from the iffy CG used to conjure these other worlds to each new iteration of Oprah’s ostentatious eyebrow fashions), DuVernay’s choice of who should play Charles Wallace seems questionable at first — if only because McCabe’s child-actorly way of playing to the camera makes the lip-smacking Welch’s Grape Juice girls look naturalistic by comparison. And yet, this being fantasy, who’s to say such precocity is out of place? Except, as readers will anticipate, something major happens to Charles Wallace that appears to be so far outside McCabe’s range that the movie all but derails during what’s meant to be its grand climax.

Whereas the film had been so attentive to detail early on (a clever moment in which Charles Wallace waits outside the principal’s office, sitting beneath a framed photo of James Baldwin, suggests the sort of phantom threads DuVernay has sewn into the lining of her film), glaring inconsistencies loom. At one point on Camazotz, Meg insists that she would never dream of abandoning her brother on the planet — only, she did exactly that just a few minutes earlier, losing track of Charles Wallace while trying to outrun the Black Thing (the boy magically reappears at the end of the scene without bothering to explain how he survived).

Part of the trouble with films like this, adapted from older books that have inspired so many other storytellers over the intervening decades, is how blasé even relatively young audiences have become to all the tropes L’Engle innovated in her time (the female fantasy hero, an all-consuming dark force that threatens to destroy the universe, using love to defeat evil). Surely that explains why DuVernay and her team — which includes costume designer Paco Delgado and effects crews at ILM and MPC — felt compelled to push the visuals to such an extreme.

Unfortunately, that strategy deprives audiences of the very thing L’Engle’s classic YA novel so marvelously encouraged: the chance to use their imagination. That’s the risk of any science-fiction adaptation, of course, seeing as how cinema replaces the most evocative descriptions with concrete images. Except in this case, a bad sound mix and over-reliance on music drowns out a good deal of the film’s dialogue. At the same time, the design aspects of the film are so consistently distracting that we risk losing sight of its best ideas — not just literary, but also a color-blind agenda that has the potential to change the landscape entirely.

Reviewed at El Capitan theater, Los Angeles, Feb. 26, 2018. MPAA Rating: PG. Running time: 109 MIN.

• Production: A Walt Disney Pictures release of a Disney presentation of a Whitaker Entertainment production. Producers: Jim Whitaker, Catherine Hand. Executive producers: Doug Merrifield, Adam Borba.
• Crew: Director: Ava DuVernay. Screenplay: Jennifer Lee, based on the novel by Madeleine L’Engle. Camera (color, widescreen): Tobias Schliessler. Editor: Spencer Averick. Music: Ramin Djawadi.
• With: Storm Reid, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling , Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Michael Peña, Zach Galifianakis, Chris Pine, Levi Miller, Deric McCabe, André Holland, Rowan Blanchard.

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A Wrinkle in Time review – wacky fantasy takes Oprah to infinity and beyond

Reese Witherspoon and Oprah Winfrey star in Ava DuVernay’s charming yarn that embraces diversity and girl power

Ava DuVernay ’s new film is a surreal and primary-coloured children’s story: good-natured, unworldly, a bit ungainly, not a masterpiece, but amiable and generous in spirit. Knowing absolutely nothing of the 1962 novel by Madeleine L’Engle on which it’s based, or the Disney TV movie of 2003, I had no fanbase-proprietary claims, no preconceptions as to how this story should be treated or reinterpreted. To me, it felt interestingly like a Roald Dahl tale but without the cynical, vinegary tang. Those tearful, final scenes and the trio of kids reminded me weirdly and pleasantly of something else: The Railway Children .

Yet A Wrinkle in Time has been a bit coolly received by critics, who have indicated that they cannot necessarily submit to its updated credentials as a story about empowerment and young people of colour. Maybe stories about dynamic male superheroes are much more eligible for acclaim on this basis, or any basis, than stories about girls.

The movie centres on Meg Murry (played by newcomer Storm Reid), a clever, shy, mixed-race girl in her early teens who is bullied at school. She has a younger brother who is even more prodigiously clever, routinely known by his first and middle names: this is Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe). Meg and Charles Wallace’s parents are both scientists. Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays their mother, whose field is particle physics, and Chris Pine is their dad. His work appears to occupy the rarefied zone between theoretical physics and pure mathematics.

One afternoon, catastrophe strikes. Meg’s dad gives a lecture at which he beamingly reveals to an audience of scientists and rationalists his belief in mind-controlled travel through time and space. Two points on the space-time continuum, he suggests, can be pinched together, like separate points on a piece of paper: all that is needed is a fold or a wrinkle. Everyone is aghast. Murry is mocked for his embarrassing and grotesquely unscientific pronouncement and his reputation is in tatters. Humiliation is heaped on his family then he simply disappears. All of Meg’s teachers and perhaps even her mother have come to believe that he simply succumbed to a mental breakdown – of which this “wrinkle in time” stuff was an obvious first symptom – and ran away, or maybe had an affair.

But Meg keeps the faith, believing passionately that her father has gone on a hyperspace journey to the far reaches of the cosmos. She sets out to find him, along with Charles Wallace, and Calvin (Levi Miller), a neighbouring boy who is not-so-secretly in love with Meg. Meg is also helped by three very odd wise women: Mrs Who ( Mindy Kaling ), Mrs Whatsit ( Reese Witherspoon ) and Mrs Which ( Oprah Winfrey ).

These women take the children to a hyperreal, bucolic landscape, entertainingly like Middle Zealand in The Lego Movie, and Mrs Which towering colossally above them (perhaps in cheerful tribute to Winfrey’s own massive prestige) wearing an expression of monolithic, seraphic detachment. She is not unlike David Bowie in Jim Henson’s movie Labyrinth . The children go on to encounter various strange figures, such as the Happy Medium ( Zach Galifianakis ) and Red (Michael Peña), as they approach the truth about their absent father.

This is a film that is always aware of its own value system, if not preachy then a bit teachy, bearing the same reverence for women’s education and cultural diversity as the Narnia stories had for Christianity. Images of Maya Angelou and James Baldwin are there to be noticed in the background of many shots of Meg’s school life, role models pinned up on the classroom walls. Whether the film actually promotes science as such is another question. I have an uncomfortable feeling that some fans might not quite grasp the purely metaphorical basis of the wrinkle in time. And yet, without its literal application, the story loses something of its oddity and grace.

For all its avowed modernity and rebooted engagement with contemporary issues, A Wrinkle in Time does seem very much like a product of the Disney 60s: a wacky fantasy family adventure. In fact, another comparison from that innocent age came into my head, watching this: The Incredible Journey , from 1963, the story about two dogs and a cat who lose their owners and have to find their way home. A Wrinkle in Time has charm.

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A Wrinkle in Time Reviews

Disney, you will be relieved to hear, has done a decent job of adapting A Wrinkle in Time for television...

Full Review | Jan 25, 2018

Somewhat clunky but mostly faithful to the book.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 1, 2011

I haven't read the book, but I can't imagine, given its popularity, that it would have been read by as many people as it has if it were as mundane as this movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Nov 17, 2004

‘A Wrinkle in Time’ Review: Kids-Lit Classic Is One Magnificently Weird, Messy Blockbuster

• By David Fear

“It was a dark and stormy night.” That’s the first sentence of Madeline L’Engle’s 1962 fantasy novel A Wrinkle in Time, a smoke-screen opening salvo that doesn’t begin to prep readers for what lies ahead in this beloved kids’ book: tesseracts and shape-shifting biddies, shadowy forces and M.I.A. fathers, interdimensional travel and preternaturally genius preteens and the revolutionary notion that a young woman can save the world. From such simple, mundane beginnings spring the skeleton keys that unlock imaginations, and if you can say nothing else about Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of this middle school curriculum staple, it most definitely taps into a childlike sense of what-if wonder. What if a run-of-the-mill misfit kid like Meg Murry (Storm Reid) had the power to stop evil from taking over? What if the neighborhood’s crazy cat ladies were really time-tripping celestial beings? What if you took a lot of corporate money and made a genuinely odd, hallucinogenic movie that featured youngsters flying through a candy-colored landscape on a leathery cabbage?

And: What if a major blockbuster property was made by a woman of color? It’s not a question we should still have to be asking in 2018, and thankfully, we no longer have to. The story behind Wrinkle ‘s waltz to the screen has arguably eclipsed the film itself, and it’d be disingenuous not to acknowledge what a big deal it is that DuVernay – and not, say, some white twentysomething male with one decent Sundance movie under his belt – has been handed the reins to this massive endeavor. There’s never been a question as to whether she’s a major filmmaker:  Middle of Nowhere (2012) should be taught in film schools on how to make a perfect intimate indie, and Selma (2014) is one of the best biopics made by anybody in the last 20 years, full stop. It was simply whether the barrier-breaking accomplishment would, in the end, outweigh the end-result achievement. This Wrinkle in Time is undoubtedly flawed, wildly uneven and apt to tie itself in narrative knots in a quest to wow you with sheer Technicolor weirdness. It’s also undeniably DuVernay’s movie as much as Disney’s, and works best when she puts her feminine energy, high-flying freak flag and sense of empathy front and center.

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So yes, join Meg and her brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe) on that dark and stormy night, as they welcome a visitor named Mrs. Whatsit ( Reese Witherspoon ) into their household. Mom (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is understandably confused as to why this cheerful eccentric has shown up unannounced in her living room; she’s also shocked to be told that “tesseracts” are real, given that her husband ( Chris Pine ) had been preaching about a time-travel concept with that very name before he mysteriously disappeared. The siblings begin to wonder whether the woman knows where their dad is. They’re soon joined by dreamy neighborhood teen Calvin (Levi Miller) and Mrs. Whatsit’s daffy companion, the quote-spewing Mrs. Who ( Mindy Kaling ) – for once, Who’s on second and Whats(it)’s on first. As for third base, that would be the divine being that towers over all of them and calls the shots. Unsurprisingly, she looks just like Oprah.

From the moment Winfrey’s gigantic earth mother starts making a backyard bend and ripple like a disturbed waterbed, Wrinkle begins toggling between very familiar multiplex fodder and a sort of Fischer-Price’s My First Acid Trip. Between Naomi Shohan’s production design, which spans everything from Seussian fantasias to slate-grey wastelands to a beach filled with enough Day-Glo to blind an outer borough, and Paco Delgado’s extraordinary everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink costume design, the movie’s visual template tends to favor a lysergic sense of excess. (We sincerely hope Kaling got to keep those Spongebob-square ruffled pantaloons.) Bizarre touches abound, from the questionable – sure, why not make an oracle Zach Galifianakis in guyliner! – to the inspired, like a creepy suburban nightmare of 1950s conformity, bouncing balls and dead-eyed kids. 

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Whether these genuinely offbeat, brain-melting scenarios actually sync up with Frozen  writer Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell’s script, however, is where we start to find ourselves on even shakier ground than our protagonists. You’re never sure whether you’re watching a psychedelic, “difficult” science fiction movie hidden inside a Disney kids’ movie or vice versa – and you’re never sure if the movie’s ambitious attempt to serve both of those masters is a feature or a bug. The result is indeed an eyeful, an earful, a handful, but one that’s hard not to feel is dotted with collateral damage. DuVernay has reclaimed and rejiggered the concept of hero’s journey by recasting it for a young black woman, which is no small feat (and, it bears repeating, a necessity). Yet her star Storm Reid and the story itself seem to keep getting relegated and/or faded into the background at key moments, whether from sensory overload or stock moments like a shadow monster named “The IT” mounting a climactic CGI attack. No amount of Oprah’s self-affirmations can stave off the feeling that there’s tug of war going on here.

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DuVernay doesn’t so much win said war as fight it to a draw, and what you’re left with is a movie of dizzying peaks and stomach-dropping valleys. It’s worth seeing just to bask in a film that does ask for inclusion on such a grand scale, that does score points both subtle and not-so-subtle (“I’ve never seen the point of fences,” notes Whatsit, and the subtext is understood), that does question why the province of tentpoles belongs to one group and not every group. What she brings to the party is invaluable. And what is on screen is a singular adaptation that stumbles more than you wish it would. If you can embrace that and forget the title’s baggage, this dark, stormy ride may make up for it in sheer out-thereness. Every generation gets The NeverEnding Story it deserves. This one may very well be ours.

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'A Wrinkle In Time' Review: Ava DuVernay Delivers A Unique And Admirable Mess

Disney's A Wrinkle in Time represents a long-overdue milestone being passed. The fact that the film's director, Ava DuVernay of Selma and 13th , is the first woman of color to helm a Hollywood film with a budget over $100 million is remarkable; that it took the industry until 2018 to allow this barrier to be broken is unforgivable. But A Wrinkle in Time , leaving aside a marketing campaign that portends a new mega-bucks franchise, is a surprising, distinctive, sometimes mawkish, sometimes emotionally wrenching, and all-over-the-place journey. While the film is not always satisfying, its ambitions are winning enough.

Based on the Madeleine L'Engle novel, Wrinkle introduces us to awkward 12-year old Meg Murry ( Storm Reid ). Meg is an outcast at her school, belittled by a mean-girl bully and harangued by her principal for squandering her potential. Meg's troubles start at home, where she, her adopted brother Charles Wallace ( Deric McCabe ), and her scientist mother Kate ( Gugu Mbatha-Raw ) try to get by without her mysteriously missing father ( Chris Pine , the best of the Hollywood Chrises), a fellow scientist. One dark and stormy night, the Murrys are visited by an odd friend of Charles Wallace's, Mrs. Whatsit ( Reese Witherspoon ). The daffy-seeming woman soon invites him, Meg, and her schoolmate Calvin ( Levi Miller ) on a journey through time and space to find Meg's father, accompanied by two other beatifically odd women, Mrs. Who ( Mindy Kaling ) and Mrs. Which ( Oprah Winfrey ). The journey pushes Meg to the emotional brink, as she's forced to face the darkness within herself and the darkness stretching across the universe.

A Wrinkle in Time is both very grand and very internal in scope, with a climax that's literally cerebral. Though some of the L'Engle book translates easily to the big screen, much of the content has been reasonably branded unfilmable. DuVernay and screenwriters Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell  have leaned into the challenge as opposed to shying away. Some elements of the book have either been redesigned or jettisoned entirely, largely for good reason. For example, Mrs. Which, in the book, doesn't manifest physically, but when Oprah Winfrey is cast in a big-budget movie, you are going to see Oprah Winfrey in the flesh. However, some of what makes A Wrinkle in Time so distinctive on the page doesn't make a logical or successful jump to the big screen; Mrs. Who, both in the book and the film, speaks largely by quoting different pieces of culture and literature. It doesn't really work on the page, and it absolutely falters on the big screen. (Kaling, ebullient and charming as usual, does her best, but cannot make even her final, groan-inducing reference work.)

But what does work in A Wrinkle in Time often works quite marvelously. Reid has appeared in a handful of other movies and TV shows, but she has been given a star-making role with Meg. The emotional core of the story rests with Meg, and Reid shoulders the burden quite capably. Meg is plagued by, among other things, self-doubt, which isn't always easy to play or compelling to watch; Reid doesn't falter in portraying Meg's crippling lack of self-worth, however. And her big emotional moment is surprisingly raw, a counterpoint to the fantastical elements that make up the foundation of the film.

The three big names here do their best with sometimes impossibly stilted material — Witherspoon, as the chatty Mrs. Whatsit, is the standout. However, they, along with Pine, Mbatha-Raw, and Zach Galifianakis (as the Happy Medium) all exist as support for the three main kid characters. Reid delivers the best performance, although both Miller and McCabe try their best with characters who have only been slightly fleshed out from how L'Engle wrote them. Still, once the three kids are set on a specific mission and the three Mrs. are off-screen for an extended period of time, the film is at its strongest.

What is perhaps most striking about A Wrinkle in Time are its technical elements. Not all of the effects work as intended— the famous scene where Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace are confronted with a suburban neighborhood where each house and its denizens all act in the same robotically conformist fashion has painfully noticeable green-screen, for example. But DuVernay, along with cinematographer Tobias Schliessler and editor Spencer Averick, aim for something unique in the framing and cutting of many sequences and shots. There's an off-kilter, claustrophobic and hemmed-in quality to Wrinkle ; where other big-budget films might open up, the shots and pacing here feel deliberately disjointed and off-center. Once Meg and the others travel to other planets to rescue her dad, it's almost cruel for the filmmakers to not give a bigger sense of scope via wide shots. But even if the gambit doesn't always work, its very existence here is impressive.

There are some scenes in A Wrinkle in Time that run the gamut of emotion, leaping from feeling transcendent to awkward to painful to fascinating in the span of a minute or two. The film is undeniably flawed and messy, but there is a strong, passionate sense of heartbreak at its core, and the underlying message of hope and love manages to be both corny and aspirational. For all of its heady ideas, A Wrinkle in Time succeeds emotionally. For all its flaws, it has a sterling lead performance, some unexpectedly resonant images, and an unerring sense of the woman behind the camera bringing this all to life. A Wrinkle in Time may be messy, but in a uniquely admirable way.

/Film Rating: 7.5 out of 10

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A Wrinkle in Time  reviews tesser between 'thrilling' and 'heartbreaking disappointment'

Reactions were mixed from the first few press screenings

A Wrinkle in Time has big names like Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon, direction by acclaimed filmmaker Ava DuVernay, and an empowering message for young girls — especially young girls of color. But not all critics were floored by Disney’s live-action adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s novel.

EW’s Darren Franich called the film “a sincere attempt at empowerment crushed into preachy dullness,” and there were many others from the first round of press screenings with similar sentiments. Variety called it “wildly uneven,” The Hollywood Reporter noted the film “doesn’t charm or disarm,” and Forbes deemed it a “heartbreaking disappointment.”

Others, meanwhile, were overcome by this “uniquely daring” and “disarmingly earnest” film and its “extravaganza of larger-than-life characters.”

Following Selma , the Netflix documentary 13th , and OWN’s Queen Sugar , DuVernay brings to life the story of Meg Murry (Storm Reid), a young girl who journeys (“tessers”) to other worlds in search of her missing father (Chris Pine). Accompanied by her friend Calvin (Levi Miller) and three galactic beings — Mrs. Whatsit (Witherspoon), Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), and Mrs. Which (Winfrey) — Meg is encouraged to find the strength within herself and become a warrior.

Penned by Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell, A Wrinkle in Time also features Michael Pena, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Zach Galifianakis, André Holland, David Oyelowo, and Bellamy Young.

“Keep your expectations in check, and you might be pleasantly surprised,” Variety ‘s Peter Debruge writes.

Read some of the mixed reviews below.

Darren Franich ( Entertainment Weekly ) “DuVernay captures L’Engle’s cosmic female vision, splendidly diversifies the cast of characters … and then sends all those characters to planets that all look like green-screen calamities, as colorful and infuriating as Apple’s rainbow wheel of death. You feel some hesitation in the storytelling here. The three Mrs. W’s overexplain every wonder with PowerPoint precision. Anything they don’t explain gets covered by Pine, trapped in a series of horrid flashbacks, including one where he delivers an actual PowerPoint lecture about the film’s psycho-spiritual cosmology.”

Peter Debruge ( Variety ) “Despite such bold choices as casting Oprah Winfrey as an all-wise celestial being and rejecting the antiquated assumption that the lead characters ought to be white, A Wrinkle in Time is wildly uneven, weirdly suspenseless, and tonally all over the place, relying on wall-to-wall music to supply the missing emotional connection and trowel over huge plot holes.”

Todd McCarthy ( The Hollywood Reporter ) “Only the faintest glimmers of genuine, earned emotion pierce through the layers of intense calculation that encumber Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time . Disney’s lavish adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s fantastical 1962 book (there were four sequels) about a girl’s journey through multiple dimensions to find her long-missing father may provide enough distractions to keep kids in the lowest double-digits age range interested. All the same, DuVernay’s first big-budget studio studio extravaganza after breaking through with Selma and the great documentary 13th feels cobbled together with many diverse parts rather that coalesced into an engaging whole. Even if this is widely consumed by the target audience, it doesn’t charm or disarm.”

Alonso Duralde ( The Wrap ) “DuVernay and screenwriters Jennifer Lee ( Frozen ) and John Stockwell ( Bridge to Terabithia ) give it their all, imbuing as much epic grandeur as they can into a story that seems to take place over the course of a languid afternoon. Audiences willing to forgive the script flaws in The Wizard of Oz — why doesn’t Glinda tell Dorothy right away that the slippers can take her home? — will be rewarded with an extravaganza of larger-than-life characters and mind-bending locations if they extend the same slack to A Wrinkle in Time .”

A.O. Scott ( The New York Times ) “Fans of the book and admirers of Ms. DuVernay’s work — I include myself in both groups — can breathe a sigh of relief, and some may also find that their breath has been taken away. Mine was, once or twice, though I would describe the overall experience as satisfaction rather than awe. A Wrinkle in Time , faithful to the affirmative, democratic intelligence of the book, is also committed to serving its most loyal and susceptible audience. This is, unapologetically, a children’s movie, by turns gentle, thrilling and didactic, but missing the extra dimension of terror and wonder that would have transcended the genre. Thankfully, though, Ms. DuVernay has dispensed with the winking and cutesiness that are Hollywood’s preferred ways of pandering and condescending to grown-ups.”

Justin Chang ( The Los Angeles Times ) “Whisked alongside the characters through one space-time wormhole after another, I found myself wishing that this Wrinkle were more focused, more disciplined — that its ceaseless flow of fantastical images cohered into a revelatory new application of L’Engle’s themes and insights, rather than an earnest, sometimes awkward reiteration of them. But if not all the film’s visual gambits and expository shortcuts pay off, they nonetheless turn out to be in service of a uniquely daring and adventurous sort of cinematic translation.”

Matt Singer ( ScreenCrush ) “One scene bleeds into the next with little flow or tension; the kids are told they can’t jump (or ‘tesser’) to a specific location and then they immediately do it anyway; characters go missing and then return without explanation. And the whole time Calvin, Charles Wallace, and Mrs. Which constantly pepper Meg with compliments, reminding her that she is talented and brilliant and beautiful. (Calvin fawns over Meg’s hair several times. Calvin, my dude, you’re making it weird.) They’re not wrong, and as a young woman of color, Reid’s Meg is a refreshingly unusual protagonist for a studio blockbuster. Still, the affirmations are so heavy and so persistent (‘Love is the frequency!’) that it sometimes feels like A Wrinkle in Time is adapted from a New Age self-help book instead of a classic science-fiction novel.”

Angie Han ( Mashable ) “ A Wrinkle in Time is for all the girls – and boys, and non-binary kids, and teens and adults and the elderly – who’ve ever been a Meg. It’s a flawed film that entreats us to love flawed things, up to and including our very own selves. Maybe that sounds like a hoary cliché now. It didn’t feel like one when I was watching the movie, which is so disarming[ly] earnest that I fell completely under its spell.”

April Wolfe ( LA Weekly ) “I’ll get this out of the way: I haven’t read Madeleine L’Engle’s beloved science fiction adventure novel A Wrinkle in Time , but I have seen Ava DuVernay’s heart-on-its-sleeve adaptation. No doubt there will be those who compare and contrast the book and the film, as L’Engle’s words have touched the childhoods of so many, but I’m going in fresh. And while I cannot fold time and return to my youth to experience what it would be like to find comfort in the fictions of a woman who deeply understood children’s fears and insecurities, I can say that as an adult, I was transported by DuVernay’s adaptation to the mindset of my girlhood — embarrassing insecurities and all. This is not a cynic’s film. It is, instead, unabashedly emotional.”

Kevin Fallon ( The Daily Beast ) “It’s the rare live-action family film to feel like a bonafide kids’ movie, with all the trappings of a screenplay catered to that demographic — albeit one that can at times feel on-the-nose, or more didactic than wondrous. It’s a film with lots of Disney-sparkled bells and whistles. It’s also a film that is so pure, to the extent it’s almost jarring to take in given all that’s going on in the world and how jaded we’ve allowed entertainment to become. But all of that is secondary to the film’s — and we’re wary of turning anyone off by even saying the word — importance.”

Scott Mendelson ( Forbes ) “While it is an unquestionable moral good, it is also, as a movie, a heartbreaking disappointment. A Wrinkle in Time is the very definition of a noble failure. It looks great and features a cast to die for, but it lurches from one awkwardly-staged episodic moment to the next, with little in the way of tension, urgency or defined stakes. Its splashy cast all seem to be acting in slightly different movies, with few of them (among the children and adults) hitting the right tone for the admittedly challenging source material. Even with strong imagery and its value beyond profits or IP extension, it barely holds together as a stand-alone 109-minute feature.”

A Wrinkle in Time will open in theaters on Friday.

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A Wrinkle in Time is a sincere, inspiring blockbuster for tweens. Why doesn’t it trust them?

In aiming for Disney-friendly broadness, the film leans away from its source material’s weirdest — and best — parts.

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There are at least two ways to view Ava DuVernay’s new adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time .

The first is as an inspiring, imaginative movie about growing into generosity and confidence, aimed at tweens. By that measure, A Wrinkle in Time succeeds, and even surpasses its peers — it’s just strange and sometimes visually striking enough to be unpredictable. Some of the images don’t quite hit the wondrous heights they’re aiming for (a creature that resembles a cartoonish flying lettuce leaf among them), but often enough, it feels fresh.

As a girl, I’d have identified with awkward, lonely Meg Murry, uncertain of herself, aware of her faults, and afraid to let others get too close to her. Storm Reid’ s quiet, natural performance as Meg is genuinely affecting, a convincing journey from fear to courage.

I think if I’d seen the movie as a girl, I’d have wanted to follow in Meg’s footsteps — to be braver and kinder, and to understand how love pushes away fear. I’d also have experienced the kind of wonder I remember from watching movies like The Neverending Story , movies that upended the way I thought stories worked.

But, as with Neverending Story, another way to view A Wrinkle in Time is as an adaptation. And for as much as DuVernay’s film is a lovely and good-hearted movie that delivers lots of eye-popping, imaginative awe, its status as an adaptation necessarily raises the question: Was A Wrinkle in Time the right source material through which to tell this story?

What’s in A Wrinkle in Time mostly matches the novel. But a lot was left out.

We have to ask this question because A Wrinkle in Time isn’t just some screenplay someone came up with; it’s based on Madeleine L’Engle’s beloved Newbery Medal-winning young adult fantasy novel, which was first published in 1962. Wrinkle spawned a whole series of sequels and generations of young fans (and some older ones too).

The contours of the film mostly match the novel. Meg Murry, age 13, is the relatable heroine — “ angry and resentful and stubborn, prone to shouting and fistfights and flights of self-pity .” She lives with her beautiful, brilliant scientist mother ( Gugu Mbatha-Raw ), her very average twin siblings (who aren’t in the film version), and her younger brother Charles Wallace Murry ( Deric McCabe ), who is a precocious genius. She is constantly being told to act better and feels like a disappointment to her mother.

Meg’s father ( Chris Pine ) was also a scientist, but he disappeared without a trace years earlier, and nobody knows where he went. Then late one night (a “dark and stormy night,” the book tells us), a strange woman named Mrs. Whatsit ( Reese Witherspoon ) shows up at the Murry family’s door, and amid sandwiches and tea, she mentions, in passing, that “tesseracts” are real. Mrs. Murry nearly faints at the news; her husband was working on research involving these shadowy tesseracts before he disappeared.

Soon, Meg, Charles Wallace, and Meg’s schoolmate Calvin — a boy with a rough home life who’s popular at school but considers himself an outcast — are on a journey to find Mr. Murry, led by Mrs. Whatsit and two companions, Mrs. Who ( Mindy Kaling ) and Mrs. Which ( Oprah Winfrey ). That journey leads them through the universe via “tessering,” which works by folding time and space in ways that make it easy (well, sort of easy) to bounce around to different planets.

On their way, they encounter a dark, heavy shadowy force called IT, which it turns out is evil itself. And the children realize they must fight IT, as other warriors from their planet have done in the past — people, the book’s characters say, like Jesus and Michelangelo, Shakespeare and Bach, Buddha and Beethoven, Rembrandt and Euclid. IT seeks to reduce everyone to sameness so IT can control them; what fights evil, then, is acknowledging one’s own faults and loving others in spite of theirs. That lesson, Meg discovers, is hard to learn.

The story’s broad outline remains largely consistent between the movie and the book, but there are things missing that will disappoint die-hard fans of L’Engle’s novel. Gone are the “Aunt Beast” sequences, which are also where the book often quotes the Bible (more on that in a moment); Meg’s very specific knowledge of mathematics and the periodic table of elements has mostly disappeared, leaving her to explain to Calvin at one point that she saved their lives with “some physics stuff”; the Happy Medium, a woman in the novel, is played by Zach Galifianakis ; and for some reason, Mrs. Who is only able to speak in self-consciously attributed quotations from humans, which begins to feel a tad hokey by the end.

And while a lot of the story’s creepy weirdness is still preserved, the nature of IT — for my money, the most frightening part of the book — is depicted in one scene but then largely ignored, which undercuts the whole enterprise.

The nature of IT has shifted in this movie, defanging one of Wrinkle ’s most salient insights

In the novel, IT isn’t just an evil force that makes people experience “jealousy, judgment, pain, and despair,” as the film puts it. It’s a literal brain, described in the novel as “an oversized brain, just enough larger than normal to be completely revolting and terrifying. A living brain. A brain that pulsed and quivered, that seized and commanded ... IT was the most horrible, the most repellent thing [Meg] had ever seen, far more nauseating than anything she had ever imagined with her conscious mind, or that had ever tormented her in her most terrible nightmares.”

The brain seizes hold of people’s consciousness, and its result isn’t just to make them bad. It actually makes them all the same . It erases the differences between them and makes them operate by preset manuals. Evil manifests as a kind of ideological groupthink.

L’Engle talked about this in her Newbery acceptance speech in 1962 (published in some editions of Wrinkle ), saying:

There are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying, dissipating universe that we can help our children avoid by providing them with “explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.”

For L’Engle, the power of evil is not just to make us bad and angry and violent, but also to put us to sleep to what is going on in the world by controlling us — the way we live, the way we think, the way we desire — until we are all the same. And that concept does show up visually in a scene in the film (which appears in the trailer).

But for the most part, the film understands IT as fear that turns to violence and destruction, without a focus on the all-consuming sameness coming from a disgusting central brain. That element is there if you sort of peer between the lines, but it’s not foregrounded in anything approaching the way the book sees it.

This is weird because in many respects, it feels like Wrinkle is constructed specifically to counteract a kind of homogeneity that can dominate movies like this. The casting, for instance, makes Meg biracial, Mrs. Murray and Mrs. Which black, Mrs. Who and Charles Murray Asian (he is adopted) — none of which is in the book, but none of which is substantially excluded by the book, either. Mrs. Who’s quotations are carefully drawn from sources all over the world, and she names the country of the speaker each time. The movie chooses to thwart traditional onscreen Hollywood sameness.

So losing the substance of what IT does feels like, at best, a lost opportunity for the film, and at worst, a misread of the story. Succumbing to IT makes life easier — “everything’s taken care of, in total, without options or alternatives,” Meg is told, and she’s tempted with a vision of herself as a more popular, smarter, prettier girl — but the result is just basically nastiness.

You can see how this would ring true with a teenager, but it’s nowhere near as chilling as the idea of everyone becoming the same, talking the same way, thinking the same way, without originality — the kind of thing that sounds a whole lot like high school.

Similarly, Meg’s deep disappointment with her father and her anger at his inability to solve things once he’s found has mostly disappeared from the story — but it’s that very experience, of discovering that adults can’t always fix the world and knowing you need to take charge yourself, that makes Meg’s journey in the novel so instantly recognizable to every young teen. (Reading those passages in the book, you can’t help but think of the teenage Parkland school shooting survivors.)

In the movie, Meg’s “faults” — one of the most important parts of the novel — are not so much her temper and her self-pity and her shortsightedness; now, her faults are more like timidity and being scared of heights and bullies.

It feels as if the film is afraid to let Meg be a real girl, afraid to unfurl evil’s true capacity and make clear the danger in fighting it. What’s left approaches the level of platitudes. “Love is always there, even if you don’t feel it — it’s always there for you,” Meg’s father tells her when she is small.

“We’re warriors who serve the good and light in the universe,” the Mrs. tell the children. Of tessering, Meg is told that “you won’t feel or see anything when you tesser until you become one with the universe, and yourself.” The children must become “warriors” who are “willing to fight the darkness and make a light for themselves to the world.” Their only conflict is between their own capacity for goodness and the shadowy darkness of IT.

Contrast that with passages like this from the novel, in which Meg finally realizes why she’d been so angry with her father:

“I wanted you to do it all for me. I wanted everything to be all easy and simple. … So I tried to pretend that it was all your fault … because I was scared, and I didn’t want to have to do anything myself—” “But I wanted to do it for you,” Mr. Murry said. “That’s what every parent wants.” He looked into her dark, frightened eyes. “I won’t let you go, Meg. I am going.” “No.” Mrs Whatsit’s voice was sterner than Meg had ever heard it. “You are going to allow Meg the privilege of accepting this danger. You are a wise man, Mr. Murry. You are going to let her go.”

There’s a recognizable authenticity to Meg’s struggles and her father’s limitations in the novel that are much less present in the movie. That’s partly as a result of its relative brevity. But, sacrificed for a message of self-love, it also feels like a serious loss.

A Wrinkle in Time isn’t afraid of spiritual content, but its handling of that material seems indicative of what it believes about its audience

Some of the changes from the book are perfectly reasonable — no movie can (or should) do in two hours what a book can do in hundreds of pages, even if it frustrates fans.

But there’s a kind of liability in broadening out a movie to make it palatable by big movie studio executive standards. Certainly a filmmaker is free to shift the aims of the story to suit her desires. But with a book like Wrinkle , losing some of the specificity of its source material can belie a mistrust in the artist.

In the novel, Christianity lays thickly upon Wrinkle , influenced by L’Engle’s own beliefs (for years she was the writer in residence at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, a progressive Episcopal congregation). In that way and others, the book is like C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series: not blatantly preachy or too ponderously allegorical but integrating long quotations from the Bible and Christian theology into a story that still works whether or not you pick up on the Christian context.

Much of that Christian content has been excised from the film version of Wrinkle . It’s hard to tell precisely what the thinking was behind this, given the broadly inclusive nature of L’Engle’s Christianity — you’d be hard-pressed to call Wrinkle anything like proselytizing, and because of this, it has been the subject of vehement criticism from some conservative Christians for decades . The movie seems fine with preserving and foregrounding other religious ideas: Figures like Buddha still get quoted in the movie, and there’s some religiously oriented language about becoming one with the universe, alongside a smidge of yoga.

Certainly there’s no effort to appeal to the moviegoing audience that flocks to Christian movies. And that move will naturally, and maybe rightly, incense some of the built-in audience for the book.

But more importantly, it undercuts the story, preserving a more vague spirituality at the expense of any particulars in a tale that’s all about particularity. One wonders while watching the film if Disney underestimates young viewers’ ability to understand that there are different religions (something that L’Engle herself was clearly interested in), many of which are interested in the matters the film addresses, and whether the better choice for someone looking to make a religiously inclusive film might have been to preserve the film’s Christianity but add influences from other systems of belief, rather than smoothing them all out into a vague swirl of “love.”

None of this is necessarily a deal breaker for families who want to go see A Wrinkle in Time , which is part brightly colored positive-attitude fable and part call to a brave but nonsectarian love for everyone. There is something here for the uncertain child in all of us.

But the best-case scenario is that those who see the movie will go home and read the books, and experience the bigger, richer, more brilliant world that L’Engle created, in all its strangeness and smartness and periodic tables and quotations from old, confusing texts and passages in which Meg voices her petulance and anger.

That’s why, at the end of the film, I was left with a lingering uneasiness about its broadness, the ways it removed what was most specifically chilling and weird about the story. It makes me wonder how much Disney trusts its young audiences to be smart and able to understand the world.

I wonder whether the movie’s attempts to celebrate our differences are rendered merely surface-level by what it dropped from the plot. And I wonder, if what Disney was after was the fuzzy sense of the need to love one another, without some of the darker elements A Wrinkle in Time offers, whether L’Engle’s book was the right one to adapt.

A Wrinkle in Time opens in theaters on March 9.

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• DVD & Streaming

A Wrinkle in Time

• Action/Adventure , Drama , Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Content Caution

In Theaters

• March 9, 2018
• Storm Reid as Meg; Oprah Winfrey as Mrs. Which; Reese Witherspoon as Mrs. Whatsit; Mindy Kaling as Mrs. Who; Levi Miller as Calvin; Deric McCabe as Charles Wallace; Chris Pine as Mr. Murry; Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Mrs. Murry; Zach Galifianakis as the Happy Medium

Home Release Date

• June 5, 2018
• Ava DuVernay

Distributor

Movie review.

It was a dark and stormy night.

Meg Murry knows all about such nights. In a way, her life’s been an endless dark, stormy night for the last four years, ever since her father disappeared.

He never even said goodbye.

Maybe he couldn’t. The NASA scientist was working on something big—exploring the concept of the tesseract , a so-called “wrinkle in time” where space folds in on itself, allowing rapid transit between stars, constellations, maybe whole galaxies.

Perhaps Mr. Murry found a way to make the tesseract work. Perhaps he was sent by the government on a daring mission. Perhaps. Or perhaps Mr. Murry simply … left. Gossips speculate that Mr. Murry tired of his wife and children and deserted them.

For Meg, the reason doesn’t much matter. Her father’s gone, and she’s never been the same. She lashes out at school, fights with her classmates. She feels awkward and ugly and desperately unintelligent. On the anniversary of her father’s disappearance, someone sticks a note on her locker: “Happy anniversary,” it says. “If only you’d disappear too!”

Back at home, Meg goes downstairs and finds her younger brother, Charles Wallace, heating up milk. Always good to be prepared , he says. Sure enough, Meg’s mother soon comes down, and there’s enough milk for her, too. Then there’s a knock on the door.

In traipses a rather alarming red-haired woman wearing a gown made from, it appears, stolen sheets. She’s a strange one, she is, and a stranger to boot—a stranger to everyone, apparently, but young Charles Wallace. He calls her Mrs. Whatsit.

She visits for a spell, tossing off strange little sentences here and there, admitting that wild, stormy nights like this are her glory. But before she departs, she turns to Mrs. Murry and says, “By the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.”

Then she’s gone, leaving the gaping Mrs. Murry behind.

Meg doesn’t know it just yet, but she’s just taken her first step on a galaxy-spanning adventure involving herself, Charles Wallace, a popular boy from school named Calvin and three of the strangest women Meg’s ever seen. If all goes well, they might just rescue Meg and Charles Wallace’s father. Oh, and save the universe while they’re at it.

But it won’t be easy: Many a dark and stormy night is on its way.

Positive Elements

A Wrinkle in Time is a curious bird, an intimate tale of family told on a galactic canvas.

We’re told that Mrs. Whatsit and her two associates, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which, are creatures of the light—celestial beings who battle darkness wherever they find it. But they do so with help: They mention that some of the greatest “warriors” against the darkness have come from Earth (rattling off names such as Einstein, Marie Curie and Gandhi), and these women would like Meg to join the fight now, too.

Meg, desperately insecure, initially doubts her role in this cosmic battle. But the plural “Mrs.” (as they’re called) encourage her to believe in herself—her inner beauty, her intelligence, her uniqueness. The wise Mrs. Which reminds Meg how improbable it is that she’s even here at all—how many events throughout the ages had to come together to make Meg “just exactly the way you are.” They encourage her to marshal not just her strengths, but her faults . Even her pain can become a catalyst for growth and hope, they say.

The tesseract, we eventually learn, is launched through love. Curiously, Mr. Murry makes this breakthrough as he watches his wife and adopted son, Charles Wallace, through a window—catalyzing the tesser that, seconds later, rips him away from his family. Elsewhere during the movie, Meg’s love for her family—first for her father, then for Charles Wallace—literally pulls her toward them, always at great risk to herself. And while I don’t want to give away too much, this film is suggests love is indeed the greatest power in the universe.

We also witness some nice family moments and hear some affirming messages about adoption. And the movie sprinkles plenty of wise little adages throughout. For instance:

“Love is always there, even if you don’t feel it,” Meg’s dad tells her.

“Of course, we can’t take any credit for our talents,” Mrs. Whatsit says. “It’s how we use them that counts.”

“It’s OK to fear the answers, Meg,” someone called the Happy Medium says. “But you can’t avoid ’em.”

I could go on, but it’s time to go on with the review.

Spiritual Elements

Those who’ve read Madeleine L’Engle’s novel A Wrinkle in Time may remember that, while not an explicitly Christian story (and Jesus, some argue, is put on a par with other secular and religious leaders), it contains a considerable level of Christian thought. L’Engle regularly quotes the Bible throughout that book.

Alas, most of those explicit references have been torn away here, replaced (at least superficially) with a certain unmoored spiritual tang.

Mrs. Who (who speaks mainly through other people’s words) quotes Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran, who was raised as a Christian but who also was influenced by Sufi Islamic mysticism. She quotes Buddha and the Islamic poet Rumi, too: “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” Mrs. Who emphasizes that God made us unique for a reason, and she says that pain can be an instrument for growth that can help marshal our apparent weaknesses for good.

To locate Meg and Charles Wallace’s father, the Happy Medium leads the children and the three Mrs. in a mystical, yoga-like ceremony. These elements, along with oft-repeated exhortations to “believe in yourself” and to embrace “oneness with the universe” could leave viewers with a New Age-y aftertaste.

That does not appear to be the creators’ intention, according to Wrinkle in Time producer Jim Whitaker, though they were aiming to make the film more inclusive. The filmmakers wanted the book’s spiritual themes to be “reflected widely in the movie for people of all faiths to be able to see themselves in it,” Whitaker told me.

We also see telekinetic forces are at work, and one character can apparently read minds well enough to see everyone’s innermost fears. Mrs. Who’s glasses have a bit of mystical power in them, as well.

Sexual Content

Calvin and Meg are attracted to one another, but the closest we get to them being a “thing” (apart from a few lingering looks) is a hug here, some hand-holding there and a few compliments regarding Meg’s hair. Mr. and Mrs. Murry kiss, with each expressing love for the another.

We hear vague speculation that Mr. Murry “disappeared” with another woman. A beach scene includes some women in bikinis and shirtless guys. Mrs. Whatsit and the Happy Medium are an item, though Whatsit says that, after a billion years, they avoid labels. (They compliment each other on their outfits, and Whatsit calls the Happy Medium “cute.”)

Violent Content

Meg suffers the brunt of the movie’s sometimes perilous battering. She’s hoisted, pulled and thrown about by strange vines or tendrils. She and Calvin initially flee what seems to be a sentient storm, but then climb into a hollow tree trunk so that the storm (which transforms into a mighty tornado) can hurl them over a gigantic wall. Meg has trouble tessering, too, often coming out of this curious state of travel in serious pain and unable to move. (Mrs. Whatsit kicks her once afterwards, to confirm that she’s still alive.) She and others get pulled down a dark hallway by some unseen force.

Meg smacks someone in the face with a basketball. (Her mother later instructs her to write an apology letter.) Calvin falls from an incredible height, saved from certain death by sentient wildflowers. A character seems to sport glowing cracks in his face for a time, for some reason. The entity IT is referenced once as “the Happy Sadist.”

Crude or Profane Language

Drug and alcohol content, other negative elements.

A dark evil is infiltrating Earth, causing many problems: One girl suffers from an eating disorder (her “eating rules” are posted on a bedroom wall). Calvin’s father berates him for a poor report card, calling him an “idiot.” Ruffians make fun of an apparently homeless guy and rifle through his stuff. Children sometimes talk back to authority figures (though the movie does not encourage that behavior), and Meg walks out on her principal.

It’s not easy to make a movie of such a beloved—and such a weird —children’s book. Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 classic has resisted efforts at cinematic translation for decades, and perhaps it was foolhardy for anyone to try. But give this Disney movie’s makers credit. Boy, did they try.

Producer Jim Whitaker told me that the production, led by director Ava DuVernay, “swung for the fences, I think in every department and every way.” And A Wrinkle in Time is indeed an incredibly daring movie. As Disney has been doing since Snow White , the studio bought the story and used it as the basis for the story it wanted to tell, leaving some of the book’s characters, scenes, themes and even feel on the cutting room floor.

The result is a bit of a messy tesseract itself.

The narrative here, while visually stunning, zooms from scene to scene with barely a reason and nary a structure, dropping us off on strange planets feeling breathless and unmoored. Sometimes things just don’t make much sense.

And the decision to strip the book’s Christian elements is mystifying to me, given the weight those elements have in the novel. It’s obvious that for L’Engle, those Christian echoes were part of the point. To excise the movie of explicit Christian allusions robs the story of some of its power, the very themes that made the novel so resonant to begin with.

At one juncture in the L’Engle’s story, for example, Dr. Murry gives Meg this exhortation, quoting Romans 8:28: “We were sent here for something,” he says. “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to his purpose.”

Contrast that with what I think is the film’s final line: “I believe in me.” Hey, it’s good to believe in yourself and all. But in comparison to the book’s clear Christian themes, the movie’s message feels overly light and perhaps a bit dispiriting.

And the thing is, DuVernay knows how to handle explicit faith elements in film. She did so masterfully in Selma , which focused on a critical moment in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s career. King’s Christian faith wasn’t an afterthought in Selma : It was central to the protagonist’s character and motivation, and I don’t think that anyone was offended by it. As it is, Disney’s attempt to be inoffensive may, ironically, offend those who could’ve been the movie’s biggest supporters: fans of the books and Christians.

But for a minute, let me set aside what the movie could’ve been and concentrate on what the movie is. And that movie is, at least in terms of its core messages, pretty good.

Meg is a wonderful, charismatic young heroine who pushes through her anxieties and insecurities not only to save her father, but to save the universe, too. This quest pits her and the forces of light—of truth and freedom and above all, love—against a dark entity that, like Satan, twists and contorts those values into something almost unrecognizable, something that uses our heroes’ own doubts and fears against them. The film shows us a family that’s both caring and broken, and it allows us to see how much they love each other even when they’re sometimes at their most unlovable. Maybe most importantly, A Wrinkle in Time still points, albeit in more subtle ways than the book, to timeless Christian truths: We are loved. We were made for a reason. As insignificant as we sometimes feel, we have purpose.

A Wrinkle in Time is no masterpiece. But it still has a wrinkle or two of its own that families can unpack and discuss. And that’s a wrinkle I can live with.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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A wrinkle in time.

• Parents say (105)
• Kids say (103)

Based on 105 parent reviews

Not Even Close to the Book

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Lovely movie and message, disappointing weird. dark, big departure from the book, honestly terrible, "woke" version of good book, director/producer/screenwriter has obviously never actually read a wrinkle in time.

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‘A Wrinkle in Time’ Movie Review

“My father is alive,” says Meg (Storm Reid). “We believe he is and the only one who can find him is you,” replies Mrs. Which ( Oprah Winfrey ), a celestial guide who’s going to try to help Meg find her father in Disney’s adventure film, A Wrinkle in Time .

Meg’s an extremely bright middle school student who’s still feeling lost and heartbroken after the strange disappearance of her father five years ago. A brilliant scientist, he claimed he’d found a way to explore the universe using only his mind.

It’s Meg’s little brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), who introduces her to three celestial guides – Mrs. Which, Mrs. Whatsit ( Reese Witherspoon ), and Mrs. Who ( Mindy Kaling ) – who have come looking for Meg, her brother, and her new friend, Calvin (Levi Miller), in order to help them save the missing scientist. It seems the three guides are going to assist the three children as they travel across the universe to search for, find, and help bring back home Meg’s father ( Chris Pine ).

A Wrinkle in Time is a science fiction fantasy adventure that’s packed with wonderful messages for children about putting family first and believing in yourself. However, it’s also missing the magic, mystery, wonder, and fun that should be the true spirit of the film. The characters lack any genuinely interesting personalities, and one of the kids who starts off likeable ends up becoming simply annoying.

The pacing of the film is tedious with too much set-up and speeches from the three celestial beings. There’s simply too much time taken with exposition. The celestial guides deliver speeches about the rules and facts of the universe and about the different plants they encounter. This makes what should be an exciting journey into a painfully boring – and long – lecture.

The overuse of CGI and the look and sound of the different planets is unimpressive and unoriginal. In one scene, Mrs. Whatsit says to the children the planet they’re on is her favorite. The planet looks as though they’re out in the green fields and flowers of a countryside. There’s absolutely nothing special or unique to be fascinated by.

Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time , directed by Ava DuVernay and adapted from the beloved Madeleine L’Engle novel, is nothing more than a disappointing yawn of a journey to a forgettable land that won’t leave a lasting impression. Read the book…skip the movie.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements and some peril

Running Time: 1 hour 49 minutes

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A wrinkle in time: the most brutal reviews.

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Unfortunately for moviegoers both young and old, the early reviews for Disney's  A Wrinkle in Time are far nastier than expected. It's actually the second live-action take on Madeleine L'Engle's beloved fantasy novel, as the award-winning book was previously adapted into a made-for-TV ABC movie back in 2003. This latest adaptation won't be so easily forgotten, however. It's already gained quite a bit of notoriety for being the first live-action film with a $100 million dollar budget to be directed by a woman of color.  Filmmaker Ava DuVernay  ranks among the most promising up-and-coming talents in Hollywood, having previously helmed Oscar-nominated films  Selma  and  13th . Couple that with all the talent A Wrinkle in Time  has going for it in front of the camera (Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Chris Pine headline a star-studded cast ), and the new adaptation seemed primed to become the next big thing in cinemas.

But then folks actually got a look at it. Early reactions to A Wrinkle in Time  were surprisingly mixed , and the first wave of reviews were even worse . Despite all the supporters DuVernay's film has in its corner, there's no getting around the fact that the movie itself is a bit of a mess.

Related: A Wrinkle in Time Review - Disney’s Latest is a Beautiful Misfire

We should point out that we usually reserve these brutal review roundups for films that have been universally panned by critics (or close to it), and that isn't quite the case for  A Wrinkle in Time . The movie currently sports a 42% rating over on  Rotten Tomatoes based on 78 reviews, indicating a mixed to negative reaction overall. But when big-budget adaptations of beloved novels fall  this far short of expectations, hard truths need to be faced. Buckle up for a bevy of attacks on poor CGI, glaring plot holes, and missed themes from the source material as we check out  The Most Brutal Reviews Of A Wrinkle In Time .

How bad is A Wrinkle in Time? It's so bad even Oprah Winfrey, Queen of the Universe, playing the Queen of the Universe, couldn't save this cinematic disaster of epic proportions ... The Guides are meant to be at funny at times, and fail miserably in that regard. They provide the story with enough self-serious and pretentious New Age "philosophy" and other spiritual mumbo jumbo as to make one nauseous. The movie drinks its own Kool-Aid. It is saturated with self-importance. The entire film is sorely lacking in any sense of humor or wit. It plods like an elephant through its inexplicable and hard to follow story line, audience be damned ... Wrinkle could be unfavorably compared to the Wizard of Oz - lacking its charm, humor and clever characters. It will stain the careers of all those involved. Years from now a college course will be taught on what went wrong with this $100 million-dollar movie. In that sense, it is an iconic film. Like Heaven's Gate or Ishtar. --  Cleveland Plain Dealer The film has the feel of an iPad video pawned off on a toddler so Dad can make comforting mac and cheese – here’s a bite-sized lesson about loving yourself and a jumble of pretty colors. --  Guardian (UK)

Surely there must be something positive to say about the production, but thoughts of an Attack of the 50-foot Oprah sequel notwithstanding, calling this an incomprehensible mess would be a compliment. Add to this the frustration brought on by sound effects that drown out crucial dialog passages, and the only thing you’ll take away from the experience is a wrinkle in your ass. --  San Diego Reader

...a crushing wave of eye-candy and mediocre technique. Considering the changes that were made to the story and the schmaltzy platitudes liberally spooned out by screenwriter Jennifer Lee, one gets the feeling that she and the director either didn’t fully grasp the material or didn’t think the audience could. To make matters worse, it’s hobbled by some surprisingly bad film-making choices. The CGI and production design are shockingly bland ... Almost every scene is so saturated with clumsily delivered ‘believe in yourself’ mantras that it becomes monotonous, meaningless and even creepy. --  Dark Horizons Barely coherent, overburdened with unimpressive special effects and hobbled by unremittingly bad acting, it will confound and bore children and adults in equal measure ... the narrative is presented in such a careless, chaotic fashion that it’s impossible to make much sense of what’s happening ... A Wrinkle in Time is a waste of yours. --  One Guy's Opinion

So A Wrinkle in Time hits that unfortunate un-sweet spot common to big-budget science-fiction/fantasy, where the spectacle feels more summarized than experienced. (Not helping much: Ramin Djawadi’s oddly terrible score, screaming emotions like an overgrown thought balloon covering up its own illustration.) Almost nothing works ... Depressingly, A Wrinkle in Time has less in common with its spiky protagonist than her plastic doppelganger, flattened into familiar wonders, a sincere attempt at empowerment crushed into preachy dullness. --  Entertainment Weekly

DuVernay fails utterly in her search for urgency in this story and cannot concoct a threat any more palpable than the “darkness” of which Mrs. Which speaks. The director loses herself in static conversation scenes and extreme close-ups of her beautiful players. That’s soap opera/TV movie camera work and no, that’s not a compliment. The “Hero’s (heroine’s) Journey” quest takes a back seat, when it’s given any seat at all. The heroine? Meh. Jake Lloyd with curls. --  Movie Nation A Wrinkle in Time is wildly uneven, weirdly suspenseless and tonally all over the place, relying on wall-to-wall music to supply the missing emotional connection and trowel over huge plot holes. --  Variety

The scenes just drag on and seem to marvel at its special effects — which aren't that strong to begin with — instead of moving the story forward. At times the movie's dramatic moments have the feeling of a cheesy Hallmark Channel movie rather than something that came from the most powerful movie studio in Hollywood. --  Business Insider

...a bad children's version of a Marvel movie sprinkled with Narnia dust. It's about as deep as knock knock joke, introducing ideas it does little if anything to explore. --  Reeling Reviews

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