A Wrinkle In Time
Maybe my expectations were too high – I didn’t realise until I put it on that this was a TV movie, and I only found out midway that not only that, but it was also edited down from a series format I think – but this was sort of a major disappointment, and I haven’t even read the book. It strikes me as amazingly odd given the year this was made (2003 according to the IMDb) that no bigwig stepped in and pushed it into a bigger budget production for the big screen, I mean with all the “classic children’s book” adaptations that have come out this decade and with even more to come, this would’ve fit right in and probably made a fortune. And somewhere here is a great movie crying to get out. Sadly, though I can’t fault the children’s performances at all, in the end this is all let down by an overlong runtime (okay, understandable if the series roots are true), very dodgy visuals, and adult performances (from the likes of Oscar nominees Alfre Woodard and Kate Nelligan, no less) that scream pantomime, the kind I absolutely abhor seeing in children’s movies, like, über-patronising stuff.
Hopefully New Line or Walden Media or someone will get around to this again in the near future, ‘cos I’m sure there’s a good movie here (which in itself I guess indicates in a roundabout way that the adaptation here isn’t entirely a failure*) . . . I’ve got sort of obsessed recently collecting a lot of these so-called old-classic-kids-books-that-for-some-reason-I’ve-never-read, preparing for a major reading binge catching up on my lost childhood, lol, and watching this certainly didn’t put me off getting hold of this one in the meantime. I guess it’s worth adding, on the rare occasion that the dodgy visuals aren’t in play in this movie, it’s certainly way above any other children’s TV movie I’ve seen.
BTW, side point . . . somebody please tell me that the Katie Stuart (Meg here) is somehow related to Kristen Stewart of Panic Room and Catch That Kid etc, lol. Maybe it’s just the similar names triggering something, but I swear they look almost identical at certain angles, lol.
* There’s another reason I don’t think this adaptation is a complete failure – I’m currently reading Drew Barrymore’s early autobiography “Little Girl Lost” and she talks about this book a lot and how she related to it and loved it as a child – basically the reason I was planning to read it already and why I decided to watch this today – and watching the movie there are definitely certain lines and scenes (the scene between Meg and her “self” for one) where I can completely understand why having read what she went through. So I’m sure there’s at least one fan who wouldn’t be entirely disappointed by this version … but what do I know?