Books To Film

They Filmed The Book-A Wrinkle in Time

For a Young Adult book, I thought A Wrinkle in Time was a nice little read.  It isn’t my favorite but I enjoyed in and think younger me might have been taken in by the imagery it produced.  However, the film wasn’t one I’d ever want to see again and I don’t think it worked in the slightest. I’m aware Brie Larson recently said she didn’t need …”a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work about A Wrinkle in Time” and I get what she’s saying in that respect.  I say this as a white dude and understand that I wasn’t the target audience for the film.

Yet, I still have an opinion about why I think certain books shouldn’t be adapted into films, or if they are, they need to be heavily tweaked for the big screen.  For me, A Wrinkle in Time is one of those books, much like The Giver, that I think is better left in the mind of the reader.  While there are ways to film spectacular sequences of light and traveling through space and physics-defying feats (see Doctor Strange), I don’t think this book was a good one to film.

Now, for a young audience, I can see them enjoying it but I feel like the plot was on shaky ground and I wasn’t entirely sure what the bad guy was after and for a movie for kids, it has to be clear.  Or I may not have the creative capacity of this young target audience for this flick.

I don’t think this book was meant for the theatre though because the message can be a bit heavy-handed and being a YA book it can run into clichés and fall into tired tropes. This doesn’t bode well for a movie in that, for me, these things can be overlooked or forgiven in a book, since it can rebound in hundreds of pages, but in the span of less than two hours it’s difficult for a movie to overcome a fast plot and, in some cases, deus ex machina. With respect to Ms. Larson, I don’t think we can defend every movie, no matter the good intentions it may have in speaking to certain groups, and for me, I have to say A Wrinkle in Time was a disappointment.