A Wrinkle In Time Review

I saw A Wrinkle In Time last night, I would say that it was an entertaining but uneven movie. Here’s my review, as always beware of potential spoilers.

A Wrinkle In Time tells the story of Meg teaming up with a trio of dimension travelling celestial beings to attempt to find her father who has become lost in space. Along the way there’s life lessons about self-acceptance and a battle against ‘the darkness’. This movie definitely has some good moments but ultimately it just feels a little bit lacklustre. I’ve never read the book that the film is based on so I can’t comment on how accurate an adaptation the movie was. However there were definitely some scenes that I think probably worked a lot stronger in prose than on screen.

Oprah absolutely stole every scene she was in. Whenever she spoke you completely paid attention to her. Her character, Mrs Which, actually reminded me a lot of Guinan from Star Trek, I mean that as a very positive thing. Personally I love the idea that both Oprah and Whoopi Goldberg are celestial being protecting the balance of the universe.

There were also very strong performances from Reese Witherspoon and Mindy Kaling as Mrs Whatsit and Mrs Who respectively. Considering how out there both of these characters are I think Witherspoon and Kaling did a strong job at convincingly bringing them to live.

I feel like if A Wrinkle In Time had maybe been in production for a couple of extra months then probably a lot of the problems would have been overcome. The plot is definitely quite uneven and there’s a feeling that the characters are sort of just going from moment to moment. There needed to be more establishing information for the characters. For example there’s a scene toward the end of the movie where Meg has to accept her faults, it’s a good scene but ultimately a lot of the emotional impact of the moment is lost as the audience hadn’t really been shown what her faults were earlier on.

The tone also feels quite off, at times A Wrinkle In Time feels like it wants to be a proper sci-fi film but then other elements fall a lot more firmly into the realm of fantasy. Sci-fi and fantasy can sometimes be combined very successfully and not all sci-fi needs to rely on hard science fact (just look at Doctor Who!) but here it felt just too uneven to work. At times the film tries to be weird, with trippy psychedelic visuals but again that falls flat. There are some very impressive shots and good cinematography but it never goes quite far enough. I feel like that gets to the main problem of A Wrinkle In Time, it just never goes quite far enough. If they’d dared to just be a bit bolder in one of these elements then I think the rest would have fallen into place.

Overall Disney’s latest live action film is a sci-fi fantasy adventure that has some good elements but just didn’t quite deliver. I don’t regret going to see A Wrinkle In Time at the cinema but I won’t be buying the DVD, however if it shows up on TV or Netflix I might watch it again.