There’s no doubt that A Wrinkle In Time is historic as director Ava DuVernay be the first time that black woman to aim a cinema with a budget of over $100 million.
That said, is the Disney space odyssey any good?
Most critics say “yes, ” if you take the blockbuster for what it is: a bright, beautiful children’s movie that( for the most component) captured the magic of its source material.
Photos: Mindy Kaling, Oprah,& Reese Witherspoon Hit A Wrinkle In Time’s Premiere
While every critic applauded DuVernay’s colorful world — including the colorblind casting of lead actresses Storm Reid, Oprah Winfrey, and Mindy Kaling — they also agreed that the movie is flawed.
Most reviewers felt that the plot was uneven, over-explained, and tonally in multiple galaxies at once. One critic even moved as far to say the cinema felt more like a New Age self help book than an adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s beloved sci-fi novel. Snap!
See the reviews — which ranged from “not so bad” to “not so good” — below!
The Not-So-Bad:
Angie Han, Mashable: “A Wrinkle in Time is for all the girls- and boys, and non-binary kids, and teens and adults and the elderly- who’ve ever been a Meg. It’s a flawed film that entreats us to enjoy flawed things, up to and including our very own egoes. Maybe that sounds like a hoary cliche now. It didn’t feel like one when I was watching the movie, which is so disarming[ ly] earnest that I fell completely under its spell.”A.O. Scott, The New York Times: “This is, unapologetically, a children’s movie, by turns gentle, thrilling and didactic, but missing the extra dimension of terror and ponder that would have transcended the genre. Thankfully, though, Ms. DuVernay has dispensed with the winking and cutesiness that are Hollywood’s opted ways of pandering and condescending to grown-ups.”
Kevin Fallon, The Daily Beast: “It’s the rare live-action family cinema to feel like a bonafide kids’ movie, with all the trappings of a screenplay catered to that demographic — albeit one that can at times seem on-the-nose, or more didactic than wondrous. It’s a film with a lot of Disney-sparkled bells and whistles. It’s also a film that is so pure, to the extent it’s almost jarring to take in given all that’s going on in the world and how fatigued we’ve allowed entertainment to become.
The Not-So-Good:
Scott Mendelson
, Fobes: “Its splashy casting all seem to be acting in somewhat different movies, with few of them( among the children and adults) reaching the right tone for the admittedly challenging source material. Even with strong imagery and its value beyond earnings or IP extension, it barely comprises together as a stand-alone 109 -minute feature.”
Darren Franich, Entertainment Weekly: “You feel some indecision in the storytelling here. The three Mrs. W’s overexplain every ponder with PowerPoint precision. Anything they don’t explain gets are covered under Pine, trapped in a series of dreadful flashbacks, including one where he delivers an actual PowerPoint lecture about the film’s psycho-spiritual cosmology.”
Todd McCarthy, The Hollywood Reporter: “Only the faintest glimmerings of genuine, earned emotion penetrate through the layers of intense calculation that encumber Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time … All the same, DuVernay’s first big-budget studio studio extravaganza after breaking through with Selma and the great documentary 13 th seems cobbled together with many diverse components instead that coalesced into an engaging whole. Even if this is widely consumed by the target audience, it doesn’t appeal or disarm.”
Peter Bebruge, Variety: “Despite such bold choices as casting Oprah Winfrey as an all-wise celestial being and rejecting the antiquated assumption that the lead characters ought to be white, A Wrinkle in Time is wildly uneven, weirdly suspenseless, and tonally all over the place, relying on wall-to-wall music to render the missing emotional linkage and trowel over huge plot holes.”
Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times: “Whisked alongside the characters through one space-time wormhole after the other, I procured myself wishing that this Wrinkle were more focused, more disciplined — that its ceaseless flow of fantastical images cohered into a revelatory new application of L’Engle’s themes and insights, rather than an earnest, sometimes awkward repetition of them.
Matt Singer, ScreenCrush: “One scene hemorrhages into the next with little flowing or tension; the kids are told they can’t jump( or’ tesser’) to a specific location and then they immediately do it anyway; characters go missing and then return without interpretation. And the whole period Calvin, Charles Wallace, and Mrs. Which constantly pepper Meg with praises, reminding her that she is talented and brilliant and beautiful … They’re not wrong, and as a young lady of colouring,[ Storm Reid] ‘s Meg is a refreshingly unusual protagonist for a studio blockbuster. Still, the affirmations are so heavy and so lingering (‘ Love is the frequency! ‘) that it sometimes feels like A Wrinkle in Time is accommodated from a New Age self-help book instead of a classic science-fiction novel.”
A Wrinkle in Time explosion into theaters Friday.
[ Image via Disney .]
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