The beloved book gets the feature treatment from Ava DuVernay, which is notable for me personally because it’s the second movie of hers that I’ve seen thus far in 2018. Reason for optimism, right? Sure. Except that this movie misses the mark in virtually every way. Sad face.
THE BLURB:
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. Joined by Meg’s classmate Calvin O’Keefe and guided by the three mysterious astral travelers known as Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which, the children brave a dangerous journey to a planet that possesses all of the evil in the universe.
WHAT WORKED:
This one is easy: the visuals were rather stunning in this flick, particularly the COLORS. And by “visuals,” I don’t exactly mean *effects* because those were veeerryyyyy uneven as we’ll get to momentarily – I literally mean things looked like. The art direction. The design. The colors. Those were stunning in some sections.
…and that’s about it. Except for Chris Pine. The actor. Not his character.
WHAT DIDN’T:
Good lord, where to start…everything. Almost everything didn’t work in this movie. But, I’m a writer so I’ll start with the script. This has to be one of the worst scripts I’ve listened to in a long, looooooong time. It was no more apparent than in a scene very, very early on, with a pair of teachers outside talking about our main characters flaws like this is some elementary school play for children. I don’t know what happened here; the screenplay was written by Jennifer Lee who wrote Wreck it Ralph which was a triumph! Maybe Lee came in after Jeff Stockwell fumbled it beyond saving–he’s responsible for the much-less-great Bridge to Terabithia, which admittedly was still much more competent than this one. Who knows. These things happen sometimes. Maybe it was the studio…
…but sure mostly of the blame has to lie on Ava shoulders, because she was the director, responsible for making sure everything got where it needed to be, and this film is just a mess EVERYWHERE. No pace. No tension. I mean, the number of times it felt like we were just standing around talking were too many to count. Characters don’t make a lick of sense…Charles Wallace suddenly becoming evil? Meg’s dad being remotely okay with leaving him behind??? It. Was. A. Mess.
Rather than berate the movie in every category, I will rather say this: even with the confusing and boring pile of disparate elements that never, ever came together…this movie is so sweet that it’s hard to hate. I don’t hate it. I was just disappointed it was so inept. I mean, you have a GIANT OPRAH who can’t move faster than 2mph…who thought that was a good idea, y’all. Yikes.
So, yeah…the bottom line on this movie is that it’s *definitely* not worth seeing in theaters, and it might be worth your children watching on their own without you in the room, because ya’ll, you’re going to be bored out of your gord.
3/10 – skip it, for sure