“A Wrinkle In Time” was published in the early 1960’s and was the first novel in the “Time Quintet” series written by Madeleine L’Engle. The book follows Meg and Charles Wallace Murry, Calvin O’Keefe and three astral beings as they search for Meg and Charles Wallace’s long lost father Dr. Murry.
As a child I loved this book and the worlds you got to experience through the eyes of Meg, Calvin and Charles Wallace. However, the recent movie adaption left me somewhat disappointed.
“A Wrinkle in Time” released in theaters on March 9, and achieved 40 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Many reviews said the plot was sloppy and not carried out well. Others said it would probably be enjoyable to kids, but not so much to those of us who grew up reading the book. I tend to agree with the second review; I was too busy being annoyed at the movie to notice the sloppy plot.
I have seen a lot of book to movie adaptations and had at least one minor problem with every single one of them. It’s pretty hard to do an adaptation right for a lot of reasons. The biggest reason is time constraint: it’s kinda hard to portray a 256 page book in two hours or less. Another huge problem I see is that everyone interprets stories and characters differently.
Therefore, I usually go into these adaptation movies expecting for it to be at least a little different and try not to get caught up on every detail they got wrong.
However, with “A Wrinkle In Time” I felt the urge to tell the creators they shouldn’t be allowed to call it an adaptation at all. Maybe a loose interpretation or a re-telling based on the book.
There were huge, and pretty important, sections of the book that never got addressed on screen. Pretty close to the beginning of the book, there is a conversation with the kids mother, Mrs. Murry, that explains a lot about what a tesseract is, and what her and Mr. Murry theorized.
This, and other encounters, is a pretty big base for the plot and helps the children understand the journey and what is happening on these other worlds. These conversations where either breezed over and forgotten, or cut from the movie entirely.
Another problem was the two cent introduction we got to “The It.” In the book there was some significant buildup to the reveal of who and what “The It” is. The movie had the iconic scene with the red bouncy balls, and the dramatic reveal of his red eyes, but they never explained what any of that meant.
With no explanation in the movie, many people who had never read the book didn’t know what was going when “The It” made his first appearance on screen.
I found it funny how in the movie Meg flipped out when the guy revealed his red eyes. She realistically had no way of knowing what that meant, since no one in the movie bothered to explain what and who “The It” was beyond the evil in the universe.
Additionally, the entire character development that Meg has in the movie, wasn’t in the book, and they played with and interpreted the main theme of the book a lot.
While I liked the theme of loving who you are, and love can overcome any evil, the whole bullying plot line was not in the book. They could have made it work, but they seemed to have sacrificed a lot of plot points from the book to incorporate new plot lines into the movie.
As someone who read that book a lot and was greatly looking forward to seeing it come to life, having subplots changed, and huge sections cut was disappointing. I did not feel like it was the “A Wrinkle in Time” I was promised and waiting for.
If the movie stood alone from the book, I wouldn’t think it was awful. Which leads me to believe that as a book to movie adaptation, it frankly sucked. Although, as a loose re-telling with some messages of love, it wasn’t half bad.
Cerridwyn Kuykendall
Associate Editor