Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: Not an easy book to translate to a movie, but a reasonably good job was done. A little too much CGI fluff for my taste.

“A Wrinkle in Time” was probably my favorite novel growing up. I have read it countless times. Meg was my first literary crush. So when I found out a movie version was coming out, I was excited! I didn’t have high hopes, of course, because how in the world do you turn “A Wrinkle in Time” into a movie? But still, excited. What would they do? Who would they cast? How will they mess it up? The answer to the latter is they did about as good a job as can be expected for such a complex, idea driven book. Still doesn’t make it a good movie, though.

My biggest complaint about what they did was throw in way too much useless CGI scenes into the movie. All at the expense of taking out actual story lines! There was no Aunt Beast! How can you get rid of Aunt Beast!? I have read that they actually shot the Aunt Beast storyline and decided to remove it to preserve the mood of the movie. A poor decision in my mind. The rest of the movie wasn’t even good enough for me to care at this point if they ever do release an uncut version. Ok, that’s probably not true. I’ll still probably hunt down the Aunt Beast scene and watch it.

As for the casting, it’s pretty solid. Meg (Storm Reid) was much of what I thought Meg would be. Perhaps not quite mousy enough, but her stubbornness and insecurity shown through wonderfully. I couldn’t even begin to have an opinion on how you cast the three Mrs.’s, but Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon) and Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling) were about as good of an interpretation as I can come up with. Mrs. Witch (Oprah Winfrey) was…meh. There was always a lot of mysteriousness wrapped up in Mrs. Witch, even fear, but instead we get a benevolent giant Oprah Winfrey. Calvin (Levi Miller) was pretty spot on. Charles Wallace (Denc McCabe)? Way off! Well, that’s not true. The IT possessed Charles Wallace was awesome! Regular Charles Wallace was way too cheery. His weirdness was there, but he just wasn’t weird enough. He exhibited more emotion that I pictured the book character to be capable of.

There is not a lot to recommend for the movie version of “A Wrinkle in Time” unfortunately. I’m not even sure there’s much to recommend for children. It doesn’t have the feel of a good children’s movie. That’s not to say the movie is bad. It’s fine. It’s just adrift in that weird Black Thing where it doesn’t quite fit categorizing.  There is still lots to recommend for the book, though! Go read that instead. Then read the other books in the series. Then read them again!