Never Judge a Book by its Movie

I know movie adaptations are awful. I know that you cannot take hundreds of pages of innermost thoughts and feelings and melt all that down into two hours of visual information. I know all of this. But what I don’t know is how you can take a multimillion dollar special effects laden extravaganza based on a classic science fiction book such as A Wrinkle in Time and just throw up all over it. Why bother using the source material if you are going to dumb it down to the masses in such a way as to render the entire point of the book absolutely meaningless? Oh, I’m angry. I’m so fucking angry.

First off, let’s talk casting. Instead of three old biddies in New England, they subbed in three multi-ethnic drag queens of various ages. Fun! Instead of an all white family, its racially diverse, which opened the story to a wider audience. Great! But can someone please for the love of God and all his angels explain to me why you can make the cast the color of the rainbow, but you can’t make Calvin’s hair red? SERIOUSLY. My love of redheads started with that book. Calvin was my first crush and his vivid red hair was definitely part of my imagination. Would it have been so hard to find a bottle of Manic Panic? Oprah had metallic eyebrows for fuck’s sake. Reese Witherspoon turned into a flying artichoke. But Calvin couldn’t have red hair? That’s bullshit.

Second, when even my kids notice how bad the directing was, you know you have made some poor choices. The entire movie is a series of close ups and extreme close ups. I can draw, from memory, the exact dimensions of Storm Reid’s nose. There were big CGI shots of alien planets, but no sense of scope. Ava Devernay was hyper focused on the spectacle but didn't know how to focus on what made the book special. 

Third, the screenwriters obviously didn’t know what to do with the story as it was told in the book. They took out entire chapters worth of story only to add in empty set pieces. For me, the book was always about Meg realizing that she has to love herself and her faults, that she can’t rely on others for her happiness, and that strength comes from within. The movie was about being a warrior of light. What does that mean? Damned if I know. But it sounds good in commercials.  

Fourth, the had the worst villain name in the history of cinema. The IT. Say it out loud. The big bad in the book is simply IT. My best guess is that the evil clown is so well known that the screenwriter felt that calling the darkness that takes over the world IT would invoke King instead of L’Engle. Fine, I will grudgingly accept that. What I will not accept is “The IT.” Call it The Darkness. Call it The Happiest Sadist (a description in the book I didn’t understand for years.) Call it Camazots after the planet where the final third of the story takes place. But don’t call it “The IT.” That just sounds stupid.

Fifth, the average movie goer is smarter than a pumpkin. Not all of them, but most. So I would really like if the movie treated the viewers as if we had half a brain. The book has chemistry, physics, higher mathematics, and Shakespeare. The movie has a giant action adventure set piece that defied all laws of logic, physics, gravity, tone, character, and plot. Given a choice between a scene of dialogue and (gasp) acting, the director chose overworked CGI every time. The movie also never bothers to explain a tesseract. It is only the central McGuffin and the freaking title of the movie.  I would have happily skipped almost all of Oprah's self-help guru nonsense word salad for a cogent explanation of a tesseract. (This is even more egregious because there was a shot of this scene in the previews!)

Sixth, the Exposition Fairy called and she wants her wings back. Kids can’t remember what day they have gym on a four-day rotating schedule, but they can remember something that happened to another kid FOUR years ago and commemorate it with a nasty note? Also, whomever had a six-year old listening to news radio in the middle of the night while it randomly discussed a non-celebrity scientist going missing certainly deserves a Razzie for exposition so clunky it clanged. We don’t need THREE back-to-back scenes telling us that Meg’s dad is missing. We ARE NOT PUMPKINS. We have brain cells, not seeds. Allows us to use them!

Seventh, the quotations. One character in the book speaks only in quotations. In the movie, she does and doesn’t depending on the needs of the script and a very lazy screenwriter. For a few months, I amused myself on Facebook by using Hamilton lyrics for every update and I could always find a line that fit. So it pissed me off that when they did quote Lin-Manuel Miranda, they used the weakest quote in his arsenal. There are billions of lines of poetry and literature and plays and quotations in the world. And the screenwriter switched Goethe for Chris Tucker???  Jesus wept.

Eighth, speaking of Jesus, where did all the religious Christian allegory go? Oh right, we can pray to God (to win a football game), we can thank God (for winning the football game), but we can’t incorporate God into a movie unless it stars Kirk Cameron. Got it, my bad.

Ninth, the problem with Calvin. Not only did they take away his red hair, they took away his balls. Calvin isn’t set decoration. He isn’t ornamental. He is integral to the plot. He is the one who explains, who communicates, who listens. He’s the Giles of this particular band of Scoobies. The Mrs don’t give all the gifts to Meg. That’s dumb. They had one for each child. And his gift helps save Mr. Murry. He almost saves Charles Wallace! He doesn’t just stand in the background and nod at people – he does stuff! And if they couldn’t figure out what to do with him, then he should have shared the same fate as Sandy and Dennys. 

And finally, we clearly have a winner in the Battle of the Actors Named Chris. Did anyone go through space and time looking for Hemsworth? Thor disappeared from Earth and no one noticed. Pratt? We put him on a starship to nowhere and let him die on it. Evans? Nope. He isn’t even the hottest Chris in the Marvel universe. Chris Pine is the only Chris that people will literally do anything for in every single movie. All Hail King Chris.