A Wrinkle in Time Saves Nine

A Wrinkle in Time Saves Nine

The new A Wrinkle in Time movie is doing its impression of what an overweight eighth grader who's on the diving board at the public pool does to impress people: it's belly flopping. I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon of typical complaints regarding the adaptation, though I will acknowledge them. The creators deliberately removed the Christian influences in the work and replaced them with meaningless, universalist tripe. In order to be diverse, they took a homogeneous family and diced it up into racially construed parts. Oprah Winfrey looks like she should be in a Dr. Seuss book. These faults have been decried at length already.

I want to bring up a few points of my own. Firstly, despite it being classic young adult literature, A Wrinkle in Time is a quirky story, one that might never really fit into a neat category on the silver screen. The characters have funny names, the concepts at play are abstract at times. The story is better served through the imagination of a reader's imagination than the closure of film. Especially when it comes to tales dealing with the metaphysical, something is lost when you see it with your own eyes. This spiritual truth regarding the mysteries of life and how they pertain to storytelling has never been grasped by Hollywood, where seeing is believing.Ultimately, the fault of this film's failure may not lie squarely upon the film makers.

Secondly, it seems that the film makers had no idea what to do with what they had. The main villain is a giant brain, and they decided to leave it out? Were they mad? Don't tell me that it would have seemed too silly, or haven't you seen how Oprah looks like Worf from Star Trek.

Captain, our movie is terrible. 

At the end of the day, this box office bomb is a mixed blessing. It's a terrible thing that this beloved book was dragged through the mud, but it's always a good thing when a bad product gets its just deserts.