Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “A Wrinkle In Time” May Be The Worst Disney Film In Over A Decade

[yasr_overall_rating]
 

After the disappearance of her scientist father, three peculiar beings send Meg, her brother, and her friend to space in order to find him.

An abomination. A travesty. A disaster, a bomb, celluloid excrement. Call it what you will, except don’t call Ava DuVernay’s latest collection of cobbled-together, eye-scorching images a film.

Because a film has to have a coherent plot. What we get here instead is a hip/nerdy young heroine, Meg (Storm Reid, lost in this vortex of nonsense), hopping through dimensions in search of her scientist father (Chris Pine), with the help of three nutty tramps – sorry – “The Misses” (Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Mindy Kaling), and her uber-annoying young brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe, spending way too much time on screen). How does Meg cross worlds? What determines which world she comes upon next (one consists of endless fields straight out of “What Dreams May Come,” while others seem to hail from Aronofsky’s nightmares)? Where did “The Misses” come from and why do they disappear halfway through? What is the all-encompassing darkness, exactly? How is Meg supposed to find her father, provided with next-to-no clues, in this chaotic psychedelia of incomprehensible nonsense?

Beats me. The plot makes zero sense. Zilch. I have not read Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 award-winning novel, upon which this film is based. I am sure it answers a lot of those questions. Or it doesn’t. Books sometimes don’t have to. But a film cannot rely on our knowledge of a book to coast along from one half-baked sequence to the next. Worse even, it brought back memories of infinitely more magical films like “The Neverending Story” and “The Chronicles of Narnia,” what with its evocation of the Nothing, its young heroine stepping through a portal in search of her parent and encountering god-like deities in the process… Only instead of Falkor, we get a flying piece of lettuce – yes, lettuce. Go see it for yourself, if you don’t believe me – or rather go buy a $16 Caesar salad and have a healthy dinner tonight.

Let’s talk about the “deities”, a.k.a. “The Misses”, a.k.a. the tramps. First, Reese Witherspoon’s Mrs. Whatsit pops up in Meg’s bedroom in a horrific ginger wig and a dress that looks like a madman’s origami collage. She hams it up so much, she puts her pig Rosita from “Sing” to shame. Mindy Kaling’s Mrs. Who joins, in wigs of varying awfulness, grinning idiotically, batting her three-foot-long eyelashes and enunciating the film’s themes by quoting random historical figures. And then – just when the lunkheaded costume design and casting choices seem to have reached their zenith – Oprah friggin’ Winfrey’s Mrs. Which shows up, wrapped in tinfoil, the size of a three-story building, towering over her… sisters? Lovers? Children? Regardless, Lady O wouldn’t have it any other way. All three women – and their hair/eyebrows – have seen better days.

Happy Medium – a character of unknown origin in a weird, pixelated hell-like cave, played by a stoned Zach Galifianakis in what amounts to a glorified cameo – is barely worth mentioning, except for the fact that he tries his best to infuse the semblance of a narrative with some much-needed irreverence and humor. It’s too little, much too late. Chris Pine is pretty smarmy to begin with – it takes the actor a lot to push past the smarm and exhibit charm – and in “Wrinkle” his character does something so irredeemable towards the end, the fact that it’s brushed under the rug minutes later and all is forgotten is astoundingly nonsensical.

The special effects rival the costumes for sheer awfulness. It’s clear Ms. DuVernay is out of her league with digital trickery, as the CGI barely serves any purpose except background, with occasional flourishes, such as the aforementioned, badly-rendered flying lettuce leaf.

“A Wrinkle in Time” is, at-best, a C-list production with a $100+ million budget, an incoherent mess, with wooden characters processing cardboard instead of emoting, logic be damned. It’s awkwardly paced, poorly acted and directed, its messages are muddled and worst of all, it’s ugly, with no sense of style or substance. I watched the “film” at a press screening with my wife. Both of our jaws remained dropped at the ineptness of it all, the sheer circus of failure on display. It was one of the only screenings where I almost walked out of the theater at about the halfway point – and I would have missed nothing if I did.

I was never a huge fan of Ava DuVernay’s chest-thumping “Selma” or the pedantic doc “13th,” but they displayed some real filmmaking chops, an acute knowledge of plot advancement and the importance of creating strong characters. It’s as if, swallowed by the massive corporation that is Disney, Ava lost track of herself, popped twelve tabs of acid… and pieced together this entire “pastiche” the next day, during the comedown.

In theaters Friday, March 9th

 

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Alex Saveliev

Alex graduated from Emerson College in Boston with a BA in Film & Media Arts and studied journalism at the Northwestern University in Chicago. While there, he got acquainted with the late Roger Ebert, who supported and inspired Alex in his career as a screenwriter and film critic. Alex has produced, written and directed a short zombie film, “Parched,” which is being distributed internationally and he is developing a series for a TV network, and is in pre-production on a major motion picture.