A WRINKLE IN TIME

      A Wrinkle in Time: Or an Aberration in Hollywood?

  
 Meg Murry and her little brother, Charles Wallace, have been without their scientist father, Mr. Murry, for five years, ever since he discovered a new planet and used the concept known as a tesseract to travel there.
A Wrinkle in Time is a Colourful mess. It's a poorly told story. Jennifer Lee did a really poor job of telling the story and Ava Duvernay who ought to have complemented the poor storytelling with brilliant directing totally failed viewers. Being based on a very well acclaimed novel, the brilliant concept was already there, the general plot idea was set on stone, and the direction for the scripting was almost certain, leaving only the art of storytelling to be decided, and my world was it poorly told.

   We recognise the fact that it being based on a novel, it didn't leave a whole lot of room for creativity or maneuverability in aspects of the movie such as character diversification or perhaps plot depth and conflict solidification, but it did however leave some room for a good fantasy story, which if properly brought to our screens would have been a hit movie.
   The problems with the movie are multitudinous. First we have the story and plot theme development. In fact, the opening scenes from the movie felt awful, it came off as though it was a flashback or at best a highlight reel. The point at which the movie began perhaps ought to have been the point at which a sequel began or maybe at least the tail end of the movie, and not the start point. It technically left viewers grasping at thin air,
while trying to figure out the mess that was the whole point of the movie. So story was poor, plot development was nonexistent and character development was missing.

  The conflict element was poor, boring, despicable and tremendously stupid and lacking in creativity. Not only was there no buildup to the conflict, but was presented with little to no panache. For the Love of God, what is "the It" ? So they couldn't have come up with a better name for the villain, or at least present the "It" with a little more finesse, something awe inspiring. Still on the lack of creativity, really? Tesseract?  They had to go there. Viewers were disappointed in the concept of the tesseract and the act of tessering! It's so poorly developed it came off as stupid, shallow and ridiculous.
    The acting itself was in shambles. Oprah Winfrey was poor, her performance shallow and her contribution insignificant. Perhaps the only performance that we can Smile about is that of Reese Witherspoon. She is a good performer, and even though we are sad she signed up for this sham of a movie, we can at least take comfort in her brilliance in character performance.Mindy Kaling on her own part was neither here nor there. It is the type of performance you could easily forget or overlook. Not impressive and not too shabby. Michael Peña's cameo was superb, but a little too short to have any significant effect on the overall outlook of the movie. Chris Pine could not have any positive impact on the movie as well. In a nutshell, it was a case of the wrong people having more screen time than the right people who had little to no time to effectively affect the movie.Storm Reid and Deric Mcabe do have a lot of potential, and we hope they do get the right mentors and sufficient guidance to become the stars the movie tried so hard to make them be.
  It can't all be dark and gloom for the movie. We can at least point to an element of the movie that did have a lot of viewers excited. The Special effects were brilliant, the CGI was stunning and magnificent. Thus where the movie failed in so many aspects, it was resplendent with a lot of colour. This we feel at least made it worth the watch, it took away the bore and made us watch till the end. Others have opined that the over reliance on CGI perhaps weakened the plot by Diverting much of the attention to the effects rather the story? We may be inclined to agree to that line of thought.

  Overall a very poor cinematic experience, poor character and plot development, weak conflict, very dismal attempt at story telling, abysmal character performance / acting,  all culminating in a ridiculously over budgeted colourful mess. It'd make for a good watch for the young ones or the young adults, but it would irritate the mature mind.
Starring Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, Storm Reid, Deric Mcabe, Michael Pena, Chris Pine,David Oyelowo, Zach Galifianakis.
  Written by Jennifer Lee
Directed by Ava Duvernay
Produced by Jim Whittaker
Walt Disney Entertainment Studios.
With a budget of 130 million USD and a box office gross of 132.7 Million USD, this movie even though being a box office hit, actually lost Disney 82 Million USD in terms of revenue. The budget just didn't produce results expected.
   We will magnanimous rate this one an FCA AppR of 5/10 for effort and CGI effects.
  Plus, who did character makeup though. Perhaps they could have held back a bit on Oprah? We wanted an elegant character, not a masquerading old warhorse.