A Wrinkle in Time

Last night I saw a Thursday preview of A Wrinkle in Time and, despite the fact that it is visually gorgeous with an important message about simply being yourself, I have to admit that I really did not like it.  Dr. Alex Murry (Chris Pine) has discovered a way to travel great distances through the universe using a tesseract, or a wrinkle in the fabric of time and space, and then he disappears for four years.  His daughter Meg (Storm Reid) is not handling his absence well but her younger brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe) introduces her to three strange beings named Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), and Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey) who take the two of them along with Calvin (Levi Miller), a school friend, on a journey through the universe to find him.  Meg ultimately must battle the evil in the universe with love to free both her father and her brother.  I first read A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle when I was eleven years old and I absolutely loved it.  The problem with bringing a beloved work of fantasy to the screen is that it represents the filmmaker's vision and that may differ significantly from a reader's vision.  This is not necessarily the fault of the filmmakers but the images on the screen, while absolutely beautiful, did not in any way resemble what I saw in my mind when I read this book all of those years ago and I really couldn't get past that.  I always pictured the Mrs. Ws as being eccentric old ladies who were more like grandmotherly figures to Meg rather than outlandish beings with garish hair and makeup and gaudy costumes.  Sadly, that is not the only problem I had with this adaptation.  I thought all of the acting was terrible.  Witherspoon and Kaling ham it up at every turn with knowing looks at the camera and Winfrey gives one speech after another about self-empowerment and it gets rather tedious.  I didn't especially like what Zach Galifianakis, as the Happy Medium, and Michael Pena, as the Red Eyed Man, did with their roles and don't even get me started on the overly precocious McCabe.  Although she and Pine have an affecting moment together near the end of the movie, Reid didn't make me care about Meg as a character because she is so passive and just reacts to what other people do.  By the end of the movie I had lost whatever interest I had in the characters (I almost left the theater before the movie was over).  There are so many plot holes that it becomes a confusing mess and the audience is told, rather than shown, what is happening.  The CGI is laughably horrible and it is very obvious that the young actors are reacting to green screens.  It seems as if the only direction they were given was to flail their arms wildly as they run!  It really does pain me to say that I didn't like this movie because representation is so important but sometimes a movie with the best of intentions is still a bad movie.