By the time "Wrinkle" reached its climactic scenes, where the stakes are highest and the resolution hangs in the balance, it carried so much forward momentum that I had to keep waking myself up so I wouldn't snore and bother the other theater patrons.
Yeah...it was like that.
Look, I'll admit: I've never read the book (shame on me, I guess, as a lifelong lover of SF and general metaphysical weirdness), so I can't judge
DuVernay's "A Wrinkle In Time" as an adaptation of L'Engle's literary favorite. But I CAN measure it as a film that wants to tell a story, and on that scale...um...
...
Uy. Never is there a real sense of conflict with which to engage: the tone and mood are so lovey-dovey, from stem to stern, that the film never feels like it's progressing in any meaningful way. The galaxy-gobbling threat doesn't, and isn't. Good performers are wasted on one-note characters (be they whimsical space-nymphs or oh-so-precious baby geniuses) in puzzling costumes and -- were those hairdos? I think they were hairdos. I mean, they were where hair is supposed to be. Expensive FX fill the screen in service to a plot that *drifts* through its paces instead of *advancing*. If there was variance in the musical score, I missed it (but I think I didn't, because I think there wasn't). Michael Peña is asked to leave his "Ant-Man" charm at home and put on a goofy mustache and some red contacts for like a few minutes, and Captain Kirk (the new one, anyway) has a beard and is interesting, but doesn't really do anything and OPE what nope I'm awake not snoring sorry no.
This is going to be someone's favorite movie, and that's a beautiful thing; art needn't be categorically *good* to be *effective*, after all, and I love the hell out of "Xanadu", so I should know. But a film that wants to tell a story should be equipped to tell a story, and if it can't do that, then...it's doing something else, I dunno, I'm...
...
...huh? No, no, I was just...just resting my eyes. It's nice, maybe you should do the same.
