A Wrinkle in Time is Kinda Weird

Many fans have encountered the issue of having their beloved books adapted to the big screen and feeling the disappointment of either it being lacklustre or their favourite parts being left on the cutting room floor, so to speak. I get that betrayal, I've seen it in many an adaptation (Irene Adler was not a Sherlock fangirl, goddamnit Moffatt!) Sorry, where was I? Ah yes, disappointing adaptations. It got to a point where my rule of thumb was to view a movie adaptation before I read the book because then, my theory was, I could enjoy both. The movie would be a fun little visual and the book would then give me extra fun bits to add to the story. Win-win, right? Enter A Wrinkle in Time.



How had I never read this book despite being a voracious reader when I was a child? I don't really know other than fantasy was never really my genre, not this type anyway. I was busy reading animal main characters in books or the occasional Babysitter's Club and by grade 6-7, I'd moved onto mysteries and thrillers that were written for adults and A Wrinkle in Time just never made it into my rotation of reads. I have always heard good things about it so when I saw the big budget, star-studded, Disney-backed blockbuster in my Netflix suggestions, I figured "why the hell not? Maybe I'll even finally check out the book after."



A good adaptation means that you should be able to view the movie and not have to have read the book to understand the basic plot. Maybe you won't get some of the deeper character insights that book readers will have but you should be able to follow along and understand things. The mark of a bad adaptation is when you are completely lost. I felt completely lost and not because the plot was complicated but because the movie just kind of expects you to get it or that you've read the book. As such, we get clunky scenes where the characters just meet and suddenly are thrust into meeting yet another new and bizarre character (who a child seems to be extremely familiar with) and we get absolutely no context. We have no idea where this lady came from, who she is, why the kid knows her, when he met her or why she's even here. Even worse, none of these questions are ever answered, we are just expected to go with it.


Just humour me here, imagine if in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, we don't get to see Lucy discover the world or meet Mr. Tumnus. Imagine instead that she just stops the initial game of hide and seek and tells her brothers and sisters that they're going to meet Mr. Tumnus now and walks them into the wardrobe and Narnia appears and no one really reacts to it, they just wander through, confused and start chatting with Mr. Tumnus without asking who he is or why he wants to see them. It would be jarring and would suck. That's what this movie feels like.



Even more jarring, is when Meg, our main character, meets Calvin and her little brother, Charles Wallace declares out of nowhere that Calvin is a good diplomat and would be good on the journey. Like, I'm sorry, what journey? What's going on now? Then he tells them that they have to meet Mrs. Who and he just waltzes into an abandoned house that is perfectly furnished when he opens the door and Charles Wallace is like this sage kid who is unfazed by any of it. He just knows what's going on and purposefully keeps his sister in the dark. It's weird. They meet Mrs. Who and then they just...go home and have dinner and Calvin is suddenly joining them even though they pretty much just interacted and her brother dragged them to meet some strange woman that speaks in quotes. I don't know, if I were Calvin, I'd have noped the hell out of that situation the first chance I got.



From here on out, it's just a bunch of scenes where they experience the world and stuff happens. This happens because suddenly the women from before and another woman have randomly appeared in the backyard and suddenly they are "tessering" to a new world to save Meg's father. I found it bizarre that the only one out of the three kids who seems to have difficulty tessering is Meg, the other two are just naturals at it, I guess. It feels weird, maybe this is a thing that worked best in the book and Meg is the audience proxy who has to learn everything but it felt off in the movie.



When they learn that Meg's father has been taken over by The Darkness because he didn't believe in a thing called love, I guess, the three women want to tesser home to regroup. Meg refuses and they are transported to a planet that apparently is close to this Darkness. As such, they nope the fuck out of this movie and leave the kids to save their own father because they can only transport themselves. From there, it's actually pretty easy for them to make their way to the Darkness lair and after Meg remembers a spyglass that Mrs. Who gave her, sees invisible stairs that take her to a big room where her father has apparently just been chilling on his knees for four years.



Unfortunately for them, Charles Wallace has turned evil and refuses to leave with them because he wants them to stay. So, here's where the movie really lost me (ok, it never really had me but this is where it wrote itself into a corner). Obviously, in every hero story, our lead has to face and conquer the evil on their own. I get this, it's dramatically relevant but at this point in the story, Meg has found her father and is not at her lowest but is happy. So, what happens is that her father tessers away because he flat out gives up on his son and he leaves Meg to deal with it. In fairness, he was trying to take Meg with him and he was only purposefully trying to abandon his one child in the depths of the universe and she refused to go with him. Still a fucking douchebag move. Father of the Year right there and it robs us of being happy for Meg to have him back. Like, how could you look at your dad the same after knowing that he tried to abandon your baby brother?


Easy fix for your narrative? Have Meg have to face her brother in order to save her father. Build it up like she has to make a choice between the two but have her love shine through and save both. That was essentially what they were going for anyway but at least in my way, the dad doesn't end up looking like a dead beat who's willing to abandon his son to ultimate evil.



What happened to Calvin? I dunno, the movie drops him because he was irrelevant. I think we're supposed to assume he tessered out with her father because he is there in the end. If he wasn't needed for the climax though, why was he there at all? I've never read the books, maybe he served a purpose there but in the movie, he was useless. Charles Wallace mentions something about him being diplomatic or approachable and hinted that this skill would be useful. Spoiler alert, it never comes up again and the most Calvin does is fall, require to be saved, and eat a sandwich made of sand. Mostly he stood around being useless. He didn't even get a send off from the universe, he just isn't mentioned. He is literally only there to be a love interest, he is the male equivalent of the lamp trope. He should have been written out so they could focus on the siblings. He wasn't needed in this version of the story.


Above all else though, do you know what grated my nerves the worst? This is really trivial but I couldn't stand that the kid's name was Charles Wallace and everyone insisted on always referring to him as such. No nicknames, no pet names, it was always "Charles Wallace!" Like he was some dignitary and not a four or five year old. It felt really unnatural and stilted. Maybe this was his name in the book but boy did it sound odd hearing his full name constantly used.


So, annoying names, bizarre character interactions, lack of development, boring empty worlds, dead beat dads, useless love interest, and flat acting, this movie failed on every level for me. For the first time in a while, I have absolutely no interest in checking out the book because the movie sapped away any interest I might have had in it. For a big studio like Disney to put this out and call it finished, is honestly a disgrace. Money cannot replace creativity and good direction.