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Disney’s ‘A Wrinkle in Time’: What People Are Saying

Disney’s latest, A Wrinkle in Time, adapts Madeleine L’Engle’s cherished 1962 novel of the […]

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Disney’s latest, A Wrinkle in Time, adapts Madeleine L’Engle’s cherished 1962 novel of the same name, bringing the science fiction, fantasy and young adult coming-of-age tale into modern day under celebrated director Ava DuVernay (Selma, 13th).

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A Wrinkle in Time sees awkward but brilliant Meg Murry (Storm Reid) and brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe) trekking across time and space to save their astrophysicist father (Chris Pine), who has mysteriously vanished, held captive on a distant planet deep in the grip of a universe-spanning evil.

Along the way, the Murry children and friend Calvin (Levi Miller) will get help in the form of three astral travelers — Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey), Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), and Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling) — making for what some have dubbed a good-natured, if a little saccharine, sci-fi fantasy adventure.

Disney Shoots Their Shot

At the heart of A Wrinkle in Time is the bond between father and daughter as it proudly displays Black Girl Magic, making for one of the most diverse box office weekends in quite some time as Marvel Studios’ Black Panther — also a Disney production — continues to dominate the global box office, having freshly crossed the $1 billion dollar mark Saturday.

It’s not often a black girl leads a $100 million dollar movie, but Disney has been forward-thinking in that respect, most of all with their Marvel Studios arm as their last four movies — Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Thor: Ragnarok, and Black Panther — all featured black women as their female leads.

As it’s looking like A Wrinkle in Time won’t capture the zeitgeist the way Black Panther has — the Marvel blockbuster is projected to win its fourth consecutive box office weekend, beating out a freshly opened Wrinkle — Disney’s latest has inspired mixed reactions from critics and online commenters.

What The Critics Are Saying

The Los Angeles Times’ Justin Chang praises A Wrinkle in Time as “gorgeous, propulsive and feverishly overwrought… the kind of picture that wears its heart on its tie-dyed sleeve.”

Wrinkle could be “more focused, more disciplined,” Chang writes, but it also boasts “gloriously unapologetic trippiness, a hallucinatory quality that is only amplified by the sheer velocity of the storytelling.”

Most of all, the sci-fi fantasy reinforces the idea “that a young girl’s imagination can change, challenge and even save the world.”

A.O. Scott of The New York Times calls Wrinkle “demonstratively generous, encouraging and large-spirited,” and is “unapologetically, a children’s movie, by turns gentle, thrilling and didactic, but missing the extra dimension of terror and wonder that would have transcended the genre.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy writes it all “seems manufactured rather than crafted, with scenes played and over-edited to visually busy but indifferent effect.” Worse, McCarthy writes, the film “feels cobbled together with many diverse parts rather than coalesced into an engaging whole.”

Entertainment Weekly’s Darren Franich agrees that “almost nothing works,” but says there are “bursts of real camp energy.”

Franich deems Wrinkle a “sincere attempt at empowerment crushed into preachy dullness,” explaining that the movie “hits that unfortunate un-sweet spot common to big-budget science-fiction/fantasy, where the spectacle feels more summarized than experienced.”

What Twitter Is Saying: The Good

What Twitter Is Saying: The Bad

What Twitter Is Saying: The Mixed

A Wrinkle in Time is now playing.

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