YMMV / A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

• Awesome Music
  • The epic, orchestral Dresage cover of "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)".
  • The film's soundtrack, as composed by acclaimed Ramin Djawadi, captures the otherworldly, dreamlike ambiance of the film. "Is This a Dream?", playing when Meg finally finds her father, is one such example.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • The "running away from the storm" segment makes no real sense; our heroes are randomly trapped in a forest that grew out of nowhere and then a storm starts. They apparently have to get over a "wall" to escape, so they run away and fly over the wall in a log. This scene was never brought up after that.
  • And right after this scene, the children come to a creepy suburbia where a Stepford Smiler housewife tries to invite them in for dinner. Meg quickly refuses and they face no resistance. And what makes it odd is that she's suspicious there...but in the next scene she and Calvin happily eat food offered to them. This is caused by taking a scene out of the book without the necessary context. In the book, this establishes Camazotz's "sameness" that is a major theme. The movie doesn't really explore this, making the scene nonsensical.
• Bile Fascination: Given its infamous reputation as one of Disney's most recent failures, the movie has aroused curiosity in some viewers wondering how bad the movie really is.
• Critical Dissonance: While it wasn't really a hit with critics or audiences, critics liked the film a little better, with a 42% on Rotten Tomatoes, praising the visual effects and cast. However, audiences did not, with a score of 27%.
• Don't Shoot the Message: Diversity and female empowerment certainly are good themes to tackle, and neither of them is totally alien to the source material, even if the execution and fidelity to the text might be up for debate.
• Ending Fatigue: After beating the IT, Meg gets a brief Disney Death before reuniting with Charles Wallace. Then a speech from the three Mrs Ws summing things up. Then a moment with her father, which is essentially a repeat of the scene where they reunited with him earlier. Then the reunion between her parents. Then a little wrap-up between Meg and Calvin, followed by the actual ending with Meg hugging Charles Wallace. All story beats that should be there, the film seems to take longer than necessary to wrap it all up.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Calling the film "anti-white" because Ava DuVernay is a left-leaning black woman. This is naturally hated by fans of the movie, and even some who are apathetic to the movie, since the film has two positively portrayed straight white male characters.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With Black Panther (2018), as Ava DuVernay was one of the first directors approached to do that film (turning it down as she wasn't comfortable with how directors in the franchise don't have full creative control) and ended up hanging out a lot with Ryan Coogler when both films were being edited across the hall from each other. It does help that both movies feature people of color as lead and supporting characters.
  • Also one with Wonder Woman (2017) as they are both tentpole movies with $100+ million budgets that happened to be directed by women and star Chris Pine in a supporting role.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Levi Miller starring brings back unfortunate memories of Pan - a similarly tepidly received child-led fantasy blockbuster that was one of the biggest bombs of the year and had many of the same criticisms aimed at this (the lead actor in both however was noted to be the saving grace).
• Hilarious in Hindsight: As many people have commented, it's rather amusing that Captain Kirk is the one responsible for creating what is essentially instantaneous warp travel. One wonders if this is a deliberate Casting Gag.
• It's Not Supposed to Win Oscars: Defenders of the film and DuVernay have used this to throw some of the criticism the film has been hit with, saying that they made a movie for "young people and young at heart" (the latter's words). The Double Toasted crew took issue with this, accusing this response of basically saying to lower your standards for good kids' movies.
• Just Here for Godzilla: People who didn't like the movie said that Storm Reid's performance was the best thing about it. One reviewer described it as "not just 'good for a child actor' but good."
• Minority Show Ghetto: The film's failure at the Box Office led to The Mary Sue writing an article about how "the film hasn't been allowed to be a film because everyone has turned it into either a pro or anti inclusion argument."
• Mis-blamed: Ava DuVernay was accused of saying anyone who gave the film a negative review was racist, which was blown entirely out of proportion from her simply making a Twitter post thanking a writer for the Vulture for noticing the subtle indications that Meg is insecure about her hair, saying he was the only white person who noticed this nod to black culture.
• Narm:
  • Reese Witherspoon's performance has been criticized as not to be taken seriously when her acting is a mixture of her Elle Woods schtick and Johnny Depp in a Tim Burton movie.
  • The scene where the upbeat pop song "Magic" by Sia suddenly starts playing in the background, especially since creates a ridiculous instance of Mood Whiplash in what follows.
  • Charles Wallace's dialogue can get very annoying very quickly for how the movie makes him unbelievably and unrealistically precocious and cutesy. He gets praise heaped upon him even though there's little evidence of his genius to back it up.
  • The entire fact that Charles Wallace is called by that exact name every single time, when you'd think he'd have picked up a nickname or two by now. This is accurate to the book, however.
  • The reveal of Veronica's low self-esteem and anorexia can be this for some given how incredibly unsubtle and cliche it is.
  • Possessed!Charles Wallace and Red both saying to Meg "Shut up, Meg!" will only bring to mind an often repeated phrase from Family Guy to many viewers.
  • With the downplaying of some of the book's more esoteric concepts surrounding fate and the removal of almost all overt references to Charles Wallace and Calvin's Psychic Powers, the scene where Calvin joins the group and says he's not sure what he's doing there can easily come off like the writer just refused to put any effort into giving him a reason to come along. (In the book it's only the first of several premonitions Calvin mentions having, but the other instances are left out of the film.)
  • Calvin is given lots of weird lines that sound a bit too flowery and forced for a boy his age - which is especially odd since Meg and Charles Wallace speak normally. Among such highlights are "your house is warm, smells good and is full of...", "cakes of all sorts", "it took a trip round the universe to get me there".
  • Calvin also has a habit of delivering his lines very intensely like he's trying to sound profound and dramatic. It's almost as if he's hoping everything he says will end up in the trailer.
  • The heartwarming reunion between the Murry parents is unusually punctuated with Dad taking time to say something about Mom's calculations. The Narm comes in when this isn't treated like a Moment Killer.
• Narm Charm: Mrs. Which is dressed like a cross between Aquaman and RuPaul, and it is magnificent.
• One-Scene Wonder: Michael Peña as Red. Only appears for a few minutes in Camazotz, but he shows how he can play his usual charm in such a way that puts him right into the Uncanny Valley.
• Questionable Casting:
  • DuVernay has been adamant about casting a diverse cast in terms of race and gender, and for the most part the response to her choices has mercifully avoided the kind of backlash usually associated with Race Lifting. That being said, some of the acting picks are rather... unorthodox.
  • The choice of Reese Witherspoon and Mindy Kaling as two of the witches sparked some befuddlement, given how they're usually depicted as older women.
  • The casting of Zach Galifianakis as the Happy Medium also caused a lot of head-scratching.
  • To a lesser extent, Chris Pine and Gugu Mbatha Raw as the Murrays. While no one doubts their acting abilities, they were seen as too young to play highly experienced scientists. Chris Pine is given some grey hair to suggest he's playing a few years older than his actual age.
  • In the original novel, Calvin is said to be much taller than Meg (he is a basketball player after all) and has bright red hair. Levi Miller is just about as tall as Storm Reid and lacks the ginger hair.
• The Scrappy:
  • Charles Wallace for many viewers, who is annoying and gets praise dumped on him for essentially doing nothing noteworthy or amazing for a child his age, aside from having a huge vocabulary. This is not entirely inaccurate to the source material, but there at least L'Engle had the advantages of text as a medium and could include subtler examples of his intellect.
  • Calvin isn't very well-liked for being a Flat Character and essentially The Load compared to the rest of the cast, but he has earned a little sympathy due to having an Abusive Dad. It's agreed that the role doesn't do Levi Miller any favors, as Calvin for some reason is given lots of weird lines that don't sound natural, and his role as a source of emotional intelligence to the more logical Murray siblings is deemphasized.
  • Veronica. She didn't add anything to the plot, and is only present in this version of the material.
• So Okay, It's Average: The film is a rather standard children's fantasy adventure with a lot of CGI and suffered from being a severely Compressed Adaptation of the source material. However it does have some highlights — such as Storm Reid's performance — and some nice characterization.
• Special Effects Failure: One of the most frequent criticisms of the movie was the overuse of (oftentimes bad) CGI.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: With all the changes made, it makes one wonder if anyone on the writing staff read the source material.
  • Adding action scenes that weren't in the book, as well as naming IT "The IT" (for obvious reasons) and having IT reside in an organic cave instead of the central Camazotz city, weren't well received by fans of the books. Race Lifting some of the characters hasn't fared well with some, either.
  • In addition, the replacement of Christian themes with generic forces of light morality came under fire from both sides of the political spectrum.
  • Changing Calvin's abuser from his mother to his father seems like a pointless change, as it plays into a a pet peeve trope for many and also brings a Double Standard between the father and Veronica; the female bully gets a Freudian Excuse while the males don't. It's not entirely atextual in the context of the series as a whole; A Swiftly Tilting Planet reveals that his mother only married him to escape her equally-abusive stepfather and it was that marriage that made her what she was, but it does remove a lot of nuance and any potential for setting up a sequel down the line had the film done better.
  • Removing Calvin's psychic powers and emotional intelligence also turns him into The Load or at least a Satellite Love Interest all to prop up Meg being the hero of the story.
  • IT lost ITs ideological roots in enforcing conformity and restricting human freedom to a generic despot without clear motivations. This change might've been motivated by the belief that IT was simply a Dirty Communist, which is obviously less relevant after the end of the Cold War, but this simplistic reading not only ignores the novel's subtext (for one thing, the ostracism the Murrays face in America simply for failing to be like their neighbors).
  • The addition of Rowan Blanchard's character, Veronica. She didn't add anything to the plot, and was given an Freudian Excuse in order to be redeemable in the end, despite being cruel to Meg.
  • The removal of Meg's younger twin brothers, Sandy and Dennys who become major characters later on in the original material and provide contrast with their intellectual and high-minded family through their willingness to be more practical.
  • In addition to removing the twins, having Charles Wallace as an adopted child fundamentally alters the central theme of Meg's insecurities from the novel: that she feels like an outsider within in her own family. She is not as "normal" as the twins, as beautiful as her mother, or as smart as Charles Wallace.
  • Changing the settings from the 50s to modern times is a bit less defensible as a criticism.
  • In the original material, Meg knew about the tesseract, but didn't know what it was used for until Mrs. Whatsit explained it to her. Here, she is fully aware of what is and can explain it perfectly.
  • Charles Wallace is turned into an Adorably Precocious Child in the film, which is not only the antithesis of his character in the book, but inverts his development arc. In the novel, he's a Child Prodigy and knows it; his character flaw is that he is arrogant. He is willingly possessed because he's sure he can defeat IT. In the film, he is basically put under a magic spell with repetitive times tables.
  • In the film, the Dark Cloud over all planets, including Earth, stems from IT on Camazotz. In the novel, each planet's Dark Cloud is the "natural", so to speak, manifestation of evil on that planet and IT is just a consequence of whatever good there used to be on Camazotz having lost the fight with it there as the people of the planet gave in.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously:
  • While the film's badness is up for debate (it was only seen as average by critics), Storm Reid got near unanimous praise for just how good she was as Meg. At only the age of twelve, she delivers a layered and heartfelt performance not only acting alongside numerous CGI special effects - but effortlessly holding her own with the likes of Chris Pine, Gugu Mbatha Raw, Reese Witherspoon, Michael Peña and Oprah Winfrey.
  • Oprah Winfrey herself really makes Mrs Which feel like The Mentor, and her Rousing Speeches lead to some genuine heartwarming moments. Doubly impressive considering she does this while CGI'd to being twelve feet tall or else in incredibly out there make-up.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Veronica is given a Freudian Excuse for her Alpha Bitch ways - she has an eating disorder. Except her bullying of Meg goes above and beyond catty teasing - sticking cruel notes to Meg's locker on the anniversary of her father's disappearance, and mocking her family's sanity. Not once is she ever called out for her general awfulness - and the one time Meg fights back at her, Veronica is never seen being punished. In fact, given that Veronica is white, she's exploiting racial privilege to get away with being mean to Meg - and she never officially apologises for the bullying either.
  • Mrs Murry too. She acts as though Meg hurting Veronica was 100% unjustified and not acknowledging that while Meg probably shouldn't have gotten violent, she was still being harassed in ways that crossed a line. Mrs Murry acts as though Veronica was not in the wrong at all and doesn't try to comfort her daughter for getting such abuse. She also snaps at Meg for "using dad" when Meg highlights how unfair she's being.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The special effects, costumes, and practical effects are breathtaking. The make-up, especially Mindy Kaling's, is amazing.

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