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.

Haunt!

Last night I had another new experience, I went to a Halloween event at a theme park.

Canada’s Wonderland hosts an annual event around this time of year called Haunt. The theme park is open late into the night so this means rides in the dark! There’s scare zones with actors roaming parts of the parks as zombies and other spooky things. Everywhere has been decorated for Halloween. And there’s themed haunted houses/scare mazes to walk though. As it was quite busy last night me and the friends I went with decided to prioritise going on rides over scares, generally the rides had shorter queues.

Out of the rides we went on my favourites were Leviathan and Minebuster. Leviathan is a rollercoaster that is really tall and drops and twists and turns if you like that sort of ride you’ll love it, it was a really exhilarating ride. Minebuster is a wooden rollercoaster, its drops are not as intense as some others but it is nonetheless a very enjoyable ride which really shakes you around, we went on it three times in a row!

Out of the scare mazes we only managed to do two, Sci-Fi House and Spirit Manor. Of course I wanted to do Sci-Fi House, it has aliens attacking a suburban house, why wouldn’t I want to do that! However out of the two of them I think I preferred Spirit Manor, it felt more immersive and it was a longer experience going through it.

We had a really good night, I really enjoyed myself. There’s no doubt that Haunt is definitely the highlight of Halloween 2017 for me.

Doctor Who – Smile Review

The new series of Doctor Who is continuing to make me smile.

The future human colony where something has gone wrong. It’s a classic story line that has appeared countless times in the sci-fi genre. It’s a story that Doctor Who has frequently used before (from 1977’s The Face of Evil to 2008’s The Doctor’s Daughter). However even though we’ve seen this type of story done before it’s a story archetype that can still work if it’s done well, Smile manages to do it well.

The real strength of this episode was watching the relationship and friendship between Bill and the Doctor develop. The Doctor is pushing Bill and she’s pushing him back. I love how Bill keeps asking questions and is very curious about all the new situations that she’s encountering each week. The way Bill reacts to stuff with enthusiasm and curiosity is really interesting to watch, because let’s be honest going to a city in the future on another planet would be cool! Peter Capaldi’s 12^th Doctor and Pearl Mackie’s Bill Potts are just such a good companion/Doctor team, in the same sort of way that it was always a joy to watch David Tennant and Catherine Tate sparking off each other.

I think one of the weakest aspects of this story were the aliens/monsters. The Vardy were an interesting concept though I feel that they would have been even stronger if they’d had chance to be a little bit more developed. And whilst moral ambiguity is interesting to play with, this is Doctor Who and sometimes you just want a big bad monster. When I first saw the Emojibots I thought that they were designed to sell toys, I definitely think that is the case after having seen the episode! However cool robots are a staple of Doctor Who – from K1 to K9 – so I’m not complaining too much about them!

In terms of the ongoing story arc I’m pretty happy with the level that they’re setting it at so far. There was another reference to the vault that the Doctor is protecting and another mention of the Doctor making an oath but otherwise it wasn’t touched on to heavily. Enough to tease but not enough to dominate the plot of this episode.

This episode was always going to be defined as the ‘Bill Potts takes her first proper trip in the TARDIS’ episode. To that end it works well in helping us get to know Bill more. This episode certainly had a few tonal similarities with The End of The World and The Beast Below, the first proper trips in the TARDIS for Rose Tyler and Amy Pond. There was even a brief allusion to Starship UK which featured in The Beast Bellow! I suspect that Smile much like those episodes won’t come to be an all-time favourite but it was an episode that epitomised much of what makes Doctor Who great.

Basically, it’s not an all-time classic episode but there’s a lot to like in Smile.

Also, I am definitely going to be reviewing the episodes of this series of Doctor Who each week. But I promise that I am going to be getting out some more non-Doctor Who blog posts soon!