Featuring a star-studded cast with the likes of Oprah Winfrey (“The Color Purple,” “The Butler”), Reese Witherspoon (“Election,” “Legally Blonde”), Chris Pine (“Star Trek (2009),” “Hell or High Water”), and Mindy Kaling (“The Mindy Project,” “The Office (2005)”), a Disney-sized budget and award-winning director Ava DuVernay (“Selma,” “13th”), Madeleine L'Engle’s supposedly unfilmable classic novel comes to the big screen. How does this story of love and family wrapped in science and intellect fair?
Credit where credit is due, the film’s sweeping visuals are its most excellent part. From the clever interpretations of the space traveling technique known as “Tessering” to the flamboyant costumes of characters such as The Man With The Red Eyes or Miss Which, “Wrinkle” has visual gusto to spare.
Ramin Djawadi’s (“Pacific Rim,” “Iron Man”) excellently bizarre score helps to bolster these grandiose sights with even grander sounds. It is also worth noting that there are countless moments where the sheer earnestness of the cast can allow joy to take hold within the audience members. However, that joy almost completely leaves when the character’s open their mouths.
The simple fact is that this is a terrible script, filled with awkward and stilted dialogue and numerous plot holes. Scenes move awkwardly and the entire film feels uneven. One moment everyone seems to be taking their leisurely time and the next, it’s a race against the clock. These kinds of tonal shifts pop up repeatedly throughout the film, and they never cease to be jarring.
Storm Reid (“12 Years a Slave,” “Sleight”) is a fine and earnest young actress, but she lacks the skill to overcome such a stilted script. Her younger brother, played by Deric McCabe fairs far better, but the worst offender is Levi Miller (“Pan,” “Better Watch Out”) as Calvin. He’s so wooden and delivers his lines in such a boringly routine way that halfway through the film he becomes groan inducing.
It’s understandable for a film about dimension hoping, space and time, and leaping across universes to have some inconsistencies regarding its plot. However, "Wrinkle" manages to be purely confusing at points due to how little the film chooses to explain about the events going on. Not everything is obvious or even manages to be disengaging, but eventually things start to pile up and it just becomes irritating how little is explained.
“Wrinkle” does win some points for its sheer bravery however. Few big budget spectaculars such as this would be willing to go for such a genuinely intense emotional center, and it’s one of the few things that feels earned. It’s realness in its emotional peaks helps to prevent the film from completely falling apart.
The film’s third act starts to redeem itself a bit. When the world truly starts to turn dark and twisted, it delivers some of the film’s most affecting moments in both emotion and surprise. The best scene in the entire film is one of pure emotion, a simple scene between two actors, with not a special effect in sight.
While it does look grand, “Wrinkle” also manages to feel overly manufactured. For a film involving these wondrous worlds and imaginative characters, so much is clearly fake due to the film’s overuse of CGI and random effects. It may all look exquisite and detailed, but at the same time, it still looks fake and overused.
Some of the movie’s best moments are completely ruined due to the film’s overreliance on pop songs. Beautiful moments that could have been so effective with a simple musical score become almost laughable with over manufactured pop lyrics being filtered in instead.
“A Wrinkle In Time” is a deeply flawed film. Enjoyment can be obtained due to its effective use of science and emotional love, its gorgeous visuals and designs, beautiful musical score, and the sheer earnestness and joy coming from its cast. But that can’t completely save a film burdened with a terrible script, wonky pacing, and overbearing plot holes. In the end, “Wrinkle” is best summed up using one of its own lines: “I’m underwhelmed.” 2/5
No comments:
Post a Comment