A Wrinkle in Time: A Movie Review From a Fan of the Book (Too much glitter! But Still Timeless.)

Yesterday, I watched A Wrinkle in Time, the movie. I liked it.

I was afraid I wasn't going to like it, but I did.

So many good books get turned into bad movies, and this could have been one of them. But they conveyed the main point of the book and didn't mess it up too badly.

So, I can forgive the tackiness and the desperate attempt to check off all of the latest PC check-boxes, because they got the POINT of the story right, and they didn't change it. The heart of the story is there.

The heart of A Wrinkle in Time (the book) is that you've got to have faith in the people you love, even when everyone else doubts them, and that faith and love are not just words, they are FORCES with POWER that can change circumstances and make things happen. A Wrinkle in Time involves a deep, metaphysical truth.

I've got to admit the 30 foot tall Oprah Winfrey was a weird sight. For one thing,
she's so well known, and all of us had her in our living rooms for so many years, that it's hard to think of her as anyone other than Oprah, the talk show host. So that kind of ruins the illusion a little bit. It interferes with the necessary suspension of disbelief that you have to have to really lose yourself in a movie. You find yourself thinking, "Hey, that's not Mrs. Who, that's 30-foot tall Oprah Winfrey! Why did they put silver glitter all over her eyebrows?"

Speaking of which (or, rather, of Which, Who and Whatsit....haha) the make-up and costumes of all three...Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Whatsit...were a little over the top. It's like there are 3 separate Effie Trinkets from the Hunger Games. But like I said, that's not the most important aspect of the story, so it's OK.

Another weird casting choice was Chris Pine as Meg's dad, the scientist. Chris Pine is the swashbuckling Captain James T. Kirk in the awesome J. J. Abrams reboot of Star Trek. He's a little too Alpha male-ish to be believable in this role. In the book I think the dad was a tall skinny guy with glasses. And they gave Chris Pine a beard, making him even more alpha-looking. Hunks with muscles and perfect tans don't usually play scientist-dreamers, who spend their free time not lifting weights, but doing physics problems on chalkboards or running computer simulations or dreaming about the distant reaches of space. Brilliant scientists don't usually look like supermodels for a reason, because they are focused more on the abstract things going on in their minds than the physical things going on in their body. Think of Einstein, with his crazy hair and mismatched socks! I'm just saying. I had trouble picturing Chris Pine as a theoretical physicist. Maybe that's shallow of me.

Another minor complaint: They left out the part of the book where someone explains the title of the movie "A Wrinkle in Time" by folding a sheet of paper to show how spacetime could theoretically be folded to shorten travel time from point A in space to point B in space...that was one of the best parts of the book. As a kid, it made physics seem really interesting and accessible.

However, they did the book justice. I loved Mrs. Which speaking in nothing but famous quotations because she has "evolve beyond language so she uses other people's words." I loved the quote she spoke to Meg: "a wound is where the light enters you." I loved seeing Meg stand up for her brother, Charles Wallace, and I loved Meg learning the difference between light and darkness, realizing what's really important in life. There's a great lesson in the movie about accepting yourself for who you are, and using your "flaws" to your advantage.
A book is almost always better than its movie, and that is true in this case too. But I have to compliment the movie makers, because they didn't totally mess it up. They did the most important things well.

The Quantum Physics of A Wrinkle in Time

For those interested in Quantum mechanics, that part about the entangled particles still being connected even though they are galaxies apart is a real thing, real science. Isn't that cool?

One of the latest theories is that the reason things can be connected that way over long distances is because space is actually a fluid. If that's true, then everything in the Universe is connected to everything else, so there doesn't need to be what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance" to explain the phenomenon of quantum entanglement. (That's not to say there's no magic in space being a fluid and therefore everything in the Universe being connected to everything else, because there's magic in that, too!)

If space is a fluid, there also don't have to be particles appearing and disappearing based on nothing but probabilities to explain the double slit experiment...the experiment where one particle of light shot at two slits creates an interference pattern on the wall behind the slits, making it seem like the one particle somehow went through both slits.

Supposedly, if space is a fluid, that explains it all. The SINGLE particle of light creates a wave by moving through the fluid (A. K. A. space), and the wave goes through the second slit and creates the interference pattern.

I don't fully understand it all, but it sounds like Einstein might have been right instead of those other guys who believed all matter is made up of just probabilities instead of real particles. It looks like there are real particles, and they make waves in the fluid of space when they move, and the waves follow the same rules as the probabilities that everyone talks about when they talk about this.

So, the idea of other dimensions and stuff in A Wrinkle in Time might be a little dated, because it might be based on the probabilistic theory of quantum mechanics, instead of this new superfluid, pilot wave theory which is actually an old theory but making a comeback.

But the fact that a kids book/movie even gets us started thinking about quantum physics and what it means for the Universe is pretty cool if you ask me.