To properly calibrate your expectations for this review, I should say at the outset: I've never read A Wrinkle in Time and therefore have no particularly strong feelings about the ways in which this film either pays homage to its source material or desecrates its codex. I judge the movie solely as a movie, and, as a movie, it's mostly fine.
Chris Pine stars as Dr. Murry, a physicist who disappeared four years ago, a random factoid that a late-night radio broadcast helpfully fills us in on. Meg (Storm Reid) and Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe) are the characters listening to the radio; they're a brother-sister duo now being raised by Mrs. Murry (Gugu Mbatha Raw) all on her lonesome. He's weird, but brilliant; she gets picked on at school by the mean girls and lectured by a principal who cannot understand her pain at having lost her father.
In order to rescue their dad—who, in a turn of events sure to displease Neil deGrasse Tyson and other stodgy literalists, has discovered that you can use your mind to travel across the universe powered by the frequency of love (don't ask)—Meg and Charles Wallace will need the help of the Mrs. Ws: Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), Who (Mindy Kaling), and Which (Oprah Winfrey).
Dr. Murry has fallen prey to The It, a monstrous fear-instilling presence that lives under the sewers of the town and … wait, sorry, that's a different monstrous fear-instilling It. This one is a big black cloud that seeks to instill fear and strip you of your will to live and wants to reduce all of Fantasia to … wait, sorry, that's a different big black cloud that seeks to instill fear and strip you of your will to live. "The It" in A Wrinkle In Time invades your mind, lowers your self-esteem, and makes parents want their kids to get good grades, I guess. (This is literally a thing that happens in the movie.)
Thematically, A Wrinkle In Time is preoccupied with the idea that you're good enough just the way you are, a cloying message repeated over and over again. Some viewers are treating this dispatch as some sort of revelation, as if every facet of children's media now isn't engaged in delivering exactly the same sort of missive. All God's Children Are Beautiful Just The Way They Are And It's Fine If They Get Bs in Math, Vassar Is A Solid Backup School.
I joke, because sincerity makes me break out in hives, but A Wrinkle in Time has a few nice moments. If you want me to inch toward tears, a nice daddy-daughter reunion is always going to be a safe bet. And some of the set and character designs in the final third of the film are fantastically creepy: a suburb where everyone dresses alike and bounces their balls in sync; a red-eyed devil played by Michael Pena that devolves into an easily-deconstructed marionette, an image that would've scarred me as a seven-year-old urchin. And I loved Charles Wallace's heel turn late in the film; creepily precocious kids are real nightmare fuel. I prefer my family features cut the sweetness with a serving of dread, a la The Neverending Story and Time Bandits, and could have used more of that here.
Yet these and other clever touches are overwhelmed by odder choices. A CGI-filled scene of the children and the Ws running through a field of flowers and flying atop a leaf of cabbage doesn't inspire wonder, it instilled boredom; similarly, an insanely loud, apocalyptic thunderstorm does not inspire fear, it just made me wince. I'm not sure it was a good idea to dress Oprah up as a 50-foot, 2,000-pound Goku statue, and I imagine she and Witherspoon sometimes muttered "television actor" under their breath while working with Kaling. And director Ava DuVernay has a strange habit of framing the heads of actors too tightly during simple dialogue scenes; if you watch this movie and are inclined to pay attention to this sort of thing, look at the way faces fill the screen. It's distracting and offputting without reflecting any real thematic or dramatic point.
A Wrinkle in Time is not great, but not terrible. A bit of a mishmash: awkwardly shot at times, clumsily acted occasionally, grotesquely sincere throughout, but with some pleasingly jarring visuals and a fine keystone performance from Chris Pine, the best of the Chrises. Compared to some of the other kids' movies for which I saw previews ahead of Wrinkle—including one in which Gob Bluth joins forces with a talking dog to take down, I think, panda smugglers—it's practically Shakespeare.