Film Review - A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

A Wrinkle in Time is based off of the novel and is directed by Ava DuVernay and stars Storm Reid as Meg a young girl mourning the disappearance of her scientist father (Chris Pine) but when three goddesses of the universe (Oprah Winfrey, Mindy Kaling and Reese Witherspoon) show up saying that they can help her find her dad across the universe the journey begins.

I was very much looking forward to this movie based off of the previews as it looked like a good mix of bold ideas based Sci-Fi for a Family Audience a tricky course to chart but if anyone could pull it off it was Ava who won enormous acclaim with her film Selma and her documentary 13th but could she make the leap to big time studio filmmaking.

Well sadly she could not because this movie is a huge mess for these reasons:

- Firstly the film makes little if no sense because so little time is taken to properly explain the scientific theories that are presented in the film in regards to Tesseracting the stars of the galaxy and every time someone mentioned the Tesseract I just kept thinking “Ah the Tesseract is a cube shape with a blue colour with a stone in the centre of it you know from the Avengers” and also I just sat there thinking “What is going on here none of this is making any sense”

- Secondly the dialogue here is atrocious as so often you have characters just talking in platitudes and phrases Ms Kaling’s character is the worst at this and only once does she sound like a normal person would talk as most of the time she just spouts out phases from literature and history, Charles Wallace the little brother of Meg sounds less like a normal little brother and more like a child of the Q Continuum from Star Trek the Next Generation.

And he too just talks in these endless platitudes that just made me think “SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP” I mean his endless inane babble just got so fucking annoying after about the third or fourth line that came out of his damn mouth and at one point I half expected him to blurt out “You’ll float too you’ll float too YOU’LL FLOAT TOO YOU’LL FLOAT TOO”

- And this leads me to my last negative and that is the IT the nothing the dark cloud as if we needed another one of those and it somehow is meant to represent the Darkness that fuels Violence and Hatred in all the universe and it comes across as a relative of the dark cloud in the Green Lantern film that also wanted to destroy everything in sight and this is a good idea in theory but in practicality it doesn’t work because so long as there is light there will always be darkness to counter it.

And all of this I take no pleasure in saying none at all because I wanted very much to like this movie and it does indeed have some good elements in it Ms Reid is very good and so is Chris Pine and the film does indeed have a good message at the centre of this messy story that being a young child who has to learn to believe in herself and have confidence and to accept her faults as being part of who she is and her search for her father across the cosmos is an affecting one but both of those elements just end up being lost amongst the messy storytelling and inane dialogue.

And also I did like the Giant Oprah effect that was fun to watch on a big cinema screen.

And so that was A Wrinkle in Time a film I was highly anticipating and was severely letdown by and I know what some will think that I somehow wanted to sink the boot into this one in a malicious way I did not I wish I could say otherwise but I cannot and it disappoints me deeply to say that, 1 out of 5.