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A Wrinkle in Time
It's a bit of a wrinkle in timing
Every once in a while someone decides to make a film about a classic of literature, one that has been so influential on so many subsequent writers that the resulting film is often a) so careful to respect its source material that it takes no chances, and b) seems incredibly derivative, given all the adaptations of subsequent material that were originally influenced by it. Such is the case with Disney's adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.
In a day and age when bookstores have huge "young adult" sections dominated by series like Harry Potter, Hunger Games, and Twilight, it's easy to forget that back when A Wrinkle in Time first appeared there was no such thing as the "young adult" market. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series, and their knock-offs, were the closest thing to any type of genre fiction aimed at tweens.
But oh, what the intervening decades have brought! So many authors have been influenced by A Wrinkle in Time that watching this latest Disney iteration (yes, Disney studios have even adapted it once before in the early 2000s) reminds you of so many other films that have done it better. The plot involves the daughter of a NASA astronaut who goes through a tesseract and has to be rescued - does that sound like Interstellar? It is, yet Interstellar did it better. The great danger is the all-corrupting "It". Does that sound like the film IT? It is, though IT did it better. But A Wrinkle in Time is a kids movie! Still there are other kids movies, such as The Never Ending Story, that also do it better - the flight on the back of the undulating flying dog/dragon predates a similar scene in this film where the kids fly on the back of an undulating Reese Witherspoon; The Never Ending Story's themes of family and the danger of the growing "Nothing" make it a similar, but far better film. Even other kids movies like Willy Wonka, and Disney's own Tomorrowland tread similar territory, without being quite so sappy, and would make time better spent.
Which is not to say that A Wrinkle in Time is irredeemably bad, it's just flat, and the timing here is about 50 years too late. Had the film been released in the 1960s, it would have been groundbreaking.
**
But oh, what the intervening decades have brought! So many authors have been influenced by A Wrinkle in Time that watching this latest Disney iteration (yes, Disney studios have even adapted it once before in the early 2000s) reminds you of so many other films that have done it better. The plot involves the daughter of a NASA astronaut who goes through a tesseract and has to be rescued - does that sound like Interstellar? It is, yet Interstellar did it better. The great danger is the all-corrupting "It". Does that sound like the film IT? It is, though IT did it better. But A Wrinkle in Time is a kids movie! Still there are other kids movies, such as The Never Ending Story, that also do it better - the flight on the back of the undulating flying dog/dragon predates a similar scene in this film where the kids fly on the back of an undulating Reese Witherspoon; The Never Ending Story's themes of family and the danger of the growing "Nothing" make it a similar, but far better film. Even other kids movies like Willy Wonka, and Disney's own Tomorrowland tread similar territory, without being quite so sappy, and would make time better spent.
Which is not to say that A Wrinkle in Time is irredeemably bad, it's just flat, and the timing here is about 50 years too late. Had the film been released in the 1960s, it would have been groundbreaking.
**
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