AAARRRGGGGHHHH! It was so bad! I ama huge fan of Mrs. L’Engle’s books and I was hoping for a decent film. Unfortunantly, I tuned in just as the cosmonaut was floating out of the giant book. I couldn’t sit through the whole thing. I found Reno 911 to be much more enjoyable.
I only watched until the first commercial break, but already I was disappointed that they sacrificed the book’s opening scene. (Dark and stormy night; Meg’s brooding in the attic, goes downstairs to find Charles Wallace waiting for her. Perfectly filmable, and the exposition could have been given in dialogue instead of voiceover.)
I’ll watch the rest of it tomorrow and give my critique, though I don’t have much hope. One thing I will say though, is that I think any version of this was already doomed, simply because technology has advanced to the point where what seemed outlandish in 1964 is perfectly normal today.
I’ve only seen the first hour, but – why did they turn the twins into typically sitcom, not-overly-bright bratty little brothers? Not the way I remember them. There’s a lot of perfectly good dialogue in L’Engle’s book; I kinda wish they’d used a bit more of it.
I knew I wouldn’t be the only one upset about this.
I watched the first hour, and then ended up tuning in to wrestling. Draw your own conclusions.
It’s been a really long time since I’ve read the book, so I can’t answer your question. But I have to ask, how did you come up with an allegory about communism? The IT planet was fascist if anything - a far cry from communism.
I have been wanting to read this book for a long time. It’s been highly recommended to me, but I’ve just never gotten around to it. My “to read” pile is HUGE. Anyway, after watching this movie last night, I was just praying that I’d come on here today to find fans of the book screaming bloody murder. If it had been otherwise I’d be terribly disappointed in the people who have recommended the book to me. So the book was better than this right? (I know it has to be, it couldn’t be worse!)
And like Dewey Finn I wondered if it were some sort of allegory about the USSR.
Well, totalitarianism anyhow. I assumed that the analogy was to communism because it was written during the Cold War. I couldn’t see someone writing about fascism that far after end of World War II.
But the question still remains whether the book should be interpreted as an allegory about societies on Earth, or just read in a literal fashion. (I always thought in English class in school that the teachers were reading far too much into the literature. I think there was a whole chapter in Moby Dick about a rope that was really supposed to be about life or something, or at least that’s what the teacher said.)
I loved the book when I was a kid, so decided not to watch the TV-movie. What did they do with the Big Giant Brain? That was the scariest and most memorable part of the book for me.
Eve:they went with the Man with the Red Eyes as the main bad guy. Of course, they dandified him up as well. He wasn’t the soulless, cold, calculating mouthpiece of IT that creeped me out as a child - he was just some dude with red eyes. Bah.
During those MWTRE scenes, there is a part where the floor splits open to show a very computer-generated, somewhat brain-like patterned…thing pulsing up at our heros. However its shown in brief glimpses and looks more like a Photoshop pattern fill than a real brain. It was so bad they tacked on some dialogue about it right as Meg and C.W. leave…
Meg: What was that???
C.W.: Its some kind of brain! Lets go!
Sheesh. Give me a real, large, disembodied, pulsating brain for out-and-out terror any day of the week.
They didn’t show the giant pulsating brain?!
A pox on them.
Indeed. Now I have to hope that the movie gets lousy ratings so they won’t get the bright idea of doing a movie for A Wind in the Door or A Swiftly Tilting Planet.
A lot of the charm of the book, to me, is Meg. I identified with her as a teen age girl who wants to be popular and attractive, but doesn’t know how. Even though I was less unpopular and never particularily troubled by my glasses. Actually, I think I read “A Wind in the Door” first, and then “A Wrinkle in Time” . At any rate, a lot of the appeal is the family, quirky, highly-intelligent but also warm and loving. Very little of that came across in the movie, which is largely due to the fact that they showed very little of the family. It seemed a lot more disjointed than the book. I’m not sure that a movie could be made that would satisfy me, I just don’t think it is as cinematic a book as say “Harry Potter” which I watched some of on Sunday. (Note: I had seen Harry Potter in the movie theater, and was enchanted by it then. Sunday, I just had the fidgets.)
It didn’t suck as violently as I expected it to.
The Happy Medium could have been dispensed with, thank you. Not that vital to the plot, and that weirdy-assed hermaphrodite they plugged in there was an unpleasant distraction.
I rather liked Camazotz. Well imagined, well assembled.
Mrs. Which coulda been done better.
My main beef with this film was that it seemed to lack a soul. So much live-action Disney product seems to be so… I dunno, homogenized, for lack of a better term. During each and every scene involving physical contact, in particular, I expect to see a little passion, a little engagement, a little chemistry… whether the contact is a hug, a kiss, or a punch, you know?
Disney movies – particularly the live-action Disneys of the seventies – feel soulless, passionless. *A Wrinkle In Time * felt that way. Precut, prefab, product. It had its moments, but I can’t say I’d ever wanna buy the DVD, if you know what I mean.
Just watched the tape. Really bad. I’m not a purist who expects an exact duplication of a book on film. I believe in judging a movie on its own merits. I understand that sometimes you have to change things a bit to make the story more cinematic; I also understand writing a movie so that it can be enjoyed by people who haven’t read the book. But there’s no excuse for making changes solely because you think the audience is simple, as I think happened in this case. (E.g., putting the town on Camazotz under a perpertually dark and stormy sky, so people will get that it’s a Bad Place.) There were lots of completely unnecessary changes, none of which added anything. Why was Aunt Beast’s planet covered with ice?
Everything was dumbed down. I’m surprised they even kept the word “tesseract”, since they left out the explanation of what the hell that is. I’m going to advise my girlfriend to skip the tv-movie and read the book, which is really a pretty quick read.
I hated it. I was looking forward to watching it, and I missed the first hour. I probably didn’t miss much.
I didn’t like the casting, with the exception of Calvin (who could easily have dyed his hair red). I didn’t like Mrs. Which being turned into some kind of weird pseudo-fairy godmother and VISIBLE. They even gave her some speeches said by other characters in other books. She hardly says anything at all in AWIT.
I didn’t like the fact that none of the people who were supposed to wear glasses did (ie, Meg and their father) so the whole scene with Calvin and then the scene where she wears Mrs. Who’s glasses were totally changed.
I didn’t like the long, drawn out part with the man with the red eyes. Some of the most powerful parts of the book involve the direct interaction with IT through Charles Wallace, which didn’t happen. I’m thinking in particular of the part where Meg and Calvin are reciting things to combat IT. Didn’t happen in this movie. They also really didn’t explain much about Ixchel, so if you hadn’t read the book, you were probably wondering what the ice planet with the wookies was all about. I was OK with the way they did Aunt Beast, but I missed some of her interaction with Meg. I also really disliked the obvious cuts - I think this movie was originally supposed to be a 4-hour miniseries and ended up being broadcast as a 3-hour film. And I didn’t get nearly the same feelings of dread from seeing the way people acted on Camazotz as I did when reading the book. It could have been done much better.
I agree with Master Wang-ka; this movie had no soul. I didn’t care about any of the characters, other than to care how much the actors were sucking or badly cast. And I kept yelling when they’d changed things or cut things that took away from the story rather than added to it.
Bleah. Sorry, Madeline, this movie did no justice to your wonderful book whatsoever.
Not only was there no giant pulsating brain (on a dais), there was no miasma!!
The miasma was like, the best part!