BEFORE: Ah, this was one of my favorite books when I was a kid - this and the "Chronicles of Narnia" series, plus "The Phantom Tollbooth", and series like Encyclopedia Brown and also the Three Investigators. Apparently I liked stories about smart kids with poor social skills, I can't imagine why - but here we are, 40 years later and nothing has changed, except now I'm watching movies about smart adults with poor social skills. Except now they're called nerds, and they're in charge of everything, and that's OK - and most of my favorite books from when I was 10 years old have now been turned into movies, but this one probably took the longest. What was the hold-up, waiting for special effects to finally enter the golden age?
This presented me with something of a dilemma - what if they make a movie version of a book I loved as a kid, and they screw it up, big-time? Am I going to end up hating a movie just because the version of the book that I remember in my mind was so much better? Well, there's no way through it but to do it, so today's the day, and I surrendered to the linking and let the chain decide.
André Holland carries over from "Moonlight" to play the school principal here - that was one of the few possible ways to link out of "Moonlight", and that's been holding up my viewing of "A Wrinkle in Time". I know what you may be thinking - what happened to "Green Book"? Why watch two movies with Mahershala Ali and not link to "Green Book", or squeeze that one in between the other two? Ah, but I need to get to "Avengers: Endgame" in just a couple days, and I also need "Green Book" to supply a very specific linking about a week and a half after that. So I will get there, soon.
THE PLOT: 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: I've got a loose theme working this week, something about absent fathers, as seen in "The Place Beyond the Pines" and also this was a very strong theme in "Moonlight". That continues tonight with the absence of Meg's father, Alexander Murry.
What I realize as an adult, which I somehow failed to pick up on when I was a kid, was that this story is very thin on practical details, especially where the mysteries of the universe are concerned. I was fascinated by the possibility of a tesseract, but then all the stuff about HOW it worked was a little foggy. If I were face-to-face with the three celestial entities, and they said, "Well, we're just going to fold space." And I'd say, "How?" They could reply, "Well, we're going to use a tesseract." And I'd say, "How does it work?" If they responded by saying, "It folds space." Again, HOW? This circular line of reasoning doesn't end up answering any questions - just because you can think something might be possible, that doesn't mean it is. "Well, we just have to find the right frequency..." Ummm, that's not really an answer, either. It's junk science, in the end.
Then Mr. Murry is seen in flashback in his backyard lab, doing all science-y stuff, with machines with lights on them, and various printouts and screens and blackboards full of numbers, only to find out that the ability to travel through space is inside his mind, and somehow "love is the frequency". And what frequency, exactly, would that be? Just by thinking of how much he loves his family, he's able to "tesser" through space? This is a little weird - if he loved his family so much, why wouldn't he stay with them, and not travel across the universe. Plus, "love" can't be a scientific answer, because there's not really anything scientific about love, it can't be expressed on a data sheet or a set of coordinates - would you let love power the Enterprise, or even navigate it? I don't think so, though Capt. Kirk probably would be willing to give that a try.
Solving the mysteries of space travel and finding an answer to the question of existence are two separate problems, however the film seems to suggest that if you come up with a way to solve the first one, you'll somehow get an answer to the second, and I'm just not believing that. For example, asking "Where do you want to drive in the car?" and "Why do we even HAVE a car?" are not the same question. Or if Mr. Murry could somehow "tesser" from here to anywhere, theoretically he could then try to figure out the origin of the universe, but since the universe is like, a really really big place, how would he even know where to go, or which direction to travel?
Now, they've changed a lot from the book that I recall, and I had to go on Wikipedia and check the summary of the novel to see exactly what they changed - in the book Meg and Charles had two other siblings, twins Sandy and Dennys, and they're MIA here. They also start the story in the book with Mr. Murry already missing, and in the film we do get to see him briefly before he disappears. Also missing are the centaur-like beings on another planet, and they changed the Happy Medium from a female character to a male character. Also in the film, the ability to generate a tesseract comes from wearing Mrs. Who's glasses, rather than somehow originating in a human's mind if they can "find the right frequency, which is love" or whatever hippie B.S. some screenwriter came up with.
They played around with color-blind casting, which is fine by me. This was already a story centered around many strong female characters, and then taking another step and making Meg the child of a mixed-race family doesn't harm the story at all, so why not do it? It's very P.C., plus there's the depiction of Charles Wallace as an adopted brother/son who's loved just as much as any other, and then there's some anti-bullying stuff as Meg faces down the "mean girls" at school, it's really a win-win all around that better reflects the culture that we live in now.
Oh, one other thing, they sort of toned down all the Biblical/religious stuff in the book, which I appreciate. The author, Madeleine L'Engle, was one of those authors who couldn't keep religion out of her fantasy stories, much like C.S. Lewis. Like I think Mrs. Who was always quoting Bible passages and stuff, and I for one believe in the separation of church and sci-fi. To some people maybe they're like chocolate and peanut butter, and go well together, but maybe some people just don't like the combination. Even the Force in Star Wars sometimes got a little too close to religion for my tastes. The first word in "science-fiction" is SCIENCE, damn it, so that's where I think most of these stories should start, and there's just no room for religion in outer space, if you ask me.
The three Mrs. can be seen as celestial beings, but they're not necessarily angels, you see? OK, maybe you choose to see them that way, but I don't. There are plenty of other more-evolved species they can be from other planets, without being angels. They could be witches, for example, because there are good witches, right? Or they could just as easily be a type of creature we don't have a word for yet. And Oprah is the biggest, wisest, most benevolent of them all, with plenty of helpful advice and appreciated gifts - yeah, that seems about right. But I still find Mindy Kaling quite annoying, no matter what movie or TV show that she's in.
Speaking of annoying, the little brother character, Charles Wallace is also annoying, but he's SUPPOSED to be that way. The character is supposed to be a kid who's too smart for his own good, like a Young Sheldon type, and he knows things but doesn't feel the need to tell you HOW he knows them, and then late in the film he's sort of possessed by an evil entity for a while, and it happened because his attitude made him vulnerable. It's a tough job for a kid actor, so I'm giving this one a pass because I thought he did a good job without going TOO far into arrogant and annoying.
My only NITPICK POINT is that there were scenes in the trailer, with Meg explaining the tesseract concept of "folding space" to her classmates, and that just wasn't in the film at all. Were there scenes from a science fair or a class project that got cut from the final film? I guess if there were scenes showing her being enthusiastic in class, those were contradicting the scenes where the principal complained about her being moody and withdrawn lately?
I'm going to try to let the 10-year old internal me choose the rating for this film tonight, because he's really been waiting over 40 years to see one of his favorite books turned into a movie. (Geez, if he knew he'd have to wait THIS long, he would have been really frustrated...). Since I grew up, that kid rarely gets a chance to speak, and it's too bad, because he was the kind of kid would say "Wow, isn't that a wild, fantastic story!" instead of "Hey, wait, that story's not possible, and let me tell you why!" Let's just say I miss that kid once in a while, but not TOO often.
Also starring Oprah Winfrey (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Reese Witherspoon (last seen in "Rendition"), Mindy Kaling (last seen in "The Night Before"), Storm Reid (last seen in "12 Years a Slave"), Levi Miller (last seen in "Pan"), Deric McCabe, Chris Pine (last heard in "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse"), Gugu Mbatha-Raw (last heard in "Beauty and the Beast"), Zach Galifianakis (last seen in "Into the Wild"), Michael Peña (last seen in "12 Strong"), Rowan Blanchard, Bellamy Young, Conrad Roberts, Yvette Cason, Will McCormack (last seen in "Boiler Room"), Daniel MacPherson, and the voice of David Oyelowo (last seen in "A Most Violent Year").
RATING: 6 out of 10 invisible steps
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