A Wrinkle in Time

I have been reading this book with my students on and off for almost thirty years.  I love it and so do the kids who read it with me.  I had high hopes for this movie, I wanted to like it so much and yet…….I really didn’t.  Madeleine L’Engle’s novel is a magical tale of Meg, an awkward teenager who joins a cosmic fight against the evil ‘It’ (decades before the Stephen King’s creepy clown), rescues her missing father and learns that she is worthy and loved.  The movie is visually stunning, but the joy and wonder have been completely sucked out.  The three figures who help her (they were once stars, who lost what made them stars in fighting ‘It’), are never referred to as such in the movie and are over-glamorized into fairy-ish figures with rather silly costumes and hairdos.  Where is the Mrs. Whatsit I fell in love with wearing those awkward scarves and mismatched socks?  What happened to Mrs. Who with her over-sized glasses making her look like an owl?  Her glasses now resemble a small, jeweled  lorgnette that she barely wears.  Everything is over explained as if the audience is not smart enough to understand the ideas that Ms. L’Engle never had to dumb down for her readers – the children and those who can read with a child-like appreciation.  Don’t even get me started on the visit to Camatzotz where the  terrifying conformity and peace that It claims to offer people is  only very briefly explored. The part of the book where Charles Wallace is left on Camatzotz and the return of a solitary Meg is completely left out, so that the subsequent rescue of her father and Charles Wallace in the film seem anti-climactic and confusing.   I will give the director kudos for offering a diverse cast and dazzling special effects (although the effects are limited in time and number), but they came at the cost of an interesting and magical story. I would recommend watching the 2003 version with three much better ladies playing the beloved Mrs’es.   I have a feeling that people who have never read the books might find this an okay movie, and a good one to take kids to see for the positive message, but it could have been a great movie.