What a mess.
When I first saw A Wrinkle in Time’s trailers, I was confused—after seeing them several more times...I remained confused. That was alright, however, as I expected the feature film to expand upon and explain its seemingly chaotic story.
It doesn’t. If anything, the feature-length film is even more confusing than its trailers. How you may ask? Well, for starters, I notice the finished product cuts out several scenes from its trailers—scenes that provided some brief exposition as to what the hell is going on. A Wrinkle in Time is just one baffling thing happening after another with little to no coherent explanation. Solutions to problems often pop out of thin air for plot convenience/progression rather than being set up. By its finale, the protagonist is congratulated for defeating a universal pure evil darkness surrounding everything, yet how the plot gets to such point and how she actually accomplishes such are still an absolute mystery to me.
A Wrinkle in Time’s special effects look cheap and subpar, which certainly isn’t good when large chunks of your film rely on heavy CGI to “dazzle and amaze”. The characters feel inhuman and artificial—not just the nonhuman ones mind you, but the “down-to-Earth” ones as well. I kept thinking how these characters’s personalities and actions felt unnatural to their current situation. It’s as if they’re androids, trying to imitate organic humans yet missing those key emotional details while going through the motions. Such uncanny valley prevents any hope of connecting and/or relating to the film's characters.
I’ve never read the original 1962 book before (nor have I seen the 2003 film adaptation), but judging by its beloved status I’m guessing Disney either took some major liberties with changing the plot and/or omitted some coherent explanations and world-building. What the 2018 A Wrinkle in Time adaptation ends up being is a film with an incoherent plot, unrelatable characters and crappy CGI. It’s unenjoyable on a storytelling level, a character-driven level and a visual level, making it one big, confusing, forgettable mess.