I think it’s important films get better/worse received over time but critics erasing their original reviews is bad. I think we should all agree on that point. To the point of Three Billboards if that was really the case, I doubt any opinions were changed after some heavy soul searching and it was more of an oh shit, a lot of people found this movie hella problematic and I gotta fit in.
There’s value in people that have good opinions the first time around. I’m all for critics going back and writing new reviews but let’s do that at least 10 years out.
A Wrinkle in Time (Ava DuVernay, 2018)
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Kirkinson
- Joined: Wed Dec 15, 2004 5:34 am
- Location: Portland, OR
Re: A Wrinkle in Time (Ava DuVernay, 2018)
People questioning the tenor of A Wrinkle in Time's reception mostly seem to be people who haven't seen it reading critics' supposed hesitancy into the reviews. After seeing it, though, it's clear to me how the film itself inspires wishy-washy evaluation, as it is a genuinely mixed bag. So much went wrong here, but at the same time it's trying to impart some admirable lessons and the third act is pretty solid and dramatically compelling, so it leaves you with a somewhat positive impression that you have to reconcile with all that came before. Moreover, despite its flaws and many notable Disneyisms, I think this is still a pretty unique and idiosyncratic film for a major studio blockbuster, and critics already have a natural inclination to encourage work like that. So the conflicted reviews seem pretty predictable to me even without the social pressure that the release of this film was carrying (which it likely never could have lived up to anyway).
It is remarkable, though, just how shaky much of the film is before the story really turns dark. Stilted performances, whole scenes of awkward exposition-dumping dialogue, confusing cuts and shot choices, mismatched eyelines, CGI-enhanced characters that never seem like they're occupying the same space—all these problems are here, feeding into one another.
Some the acting works for me, at least. Chris Pine might be better here than he's ever been, and Zach Galifianakis is surprisingly touching, even if his very brief sequence feels like it's missing a second act. I think the lead, Storm Reid, is pretty good, and makes her sadness convincing. Her scenes with Pine are the film's best moments. The other two kids are just adequate enough for child actors—and I did enjoy the reversal of having a one-dimensional male love interest who exists only to lend emotional support to the female lead, especially when one scene late in the film bluntly acknowledges just how stupid he is.
Only in the last act, when the witch trio is gone and the kids are alone on a planet that's been overtaken by "evil energy," does the film really come to life, with a sequence of scenes that are genuinely unsettling and in a couple cases even emotionally devastating. Tellingly, DuVernay accomplishes these scenes with a minimum of digital effects compared to the rest of the film, and the spell is broken when the story's climax arrives inside another dark & murky CGI environment.
Unfortunately, even my enjoyment of the last act was diminished afterwards while talking to my girlfriend, who read the books as a child and re-read them a month or so ago. She liked the film a little more than me overall, but was seriously disappointed in the sequence I liked the most, as it represented what she thought was the film's most glaring missed opportunity:
Again, I thought this sequence was the best in the film before I had any of this knowledge, but it just further feeds into my more general feeling that filmmakers today, especially in Hollywood, tend to be extremely short-sighted when it comes to the way they use music.
It is remarkable, though, just how shaky much of the film is before the story really turns dark. Stilted performances, whole scenes of awkward exposition-dumping dialogue, confusing cuts and shot choices, mismatched eyelines, CGI-enhanced characters that never seem like they're occupying the same space—all these problems are here, feeding into one another.
Some the acting works for me, at least. Chris Pine might be better here than he's ever been, and Zach Galifianakis is surprisingly touching, even if his very brief sequence feels like it's missing a second act. I think the lead, Storm Reid, is pretty good, and makes her sadness convincing. Her scenes with Pine are the film's best moments. The other two kids are just adequate enough for child actors—and I did enjoy the reversal of having a one-dimensional male love interest who exists only to lend emotional support to the female lead, especially when one scene late in the film bluntly acknowledges just how stupid he is.
Only in the last act, when the witch trio is gone and the kids are alone on a planet that's been overtaken by "evil energy," does the film really come to life, with a sequence of scenes that are genuinely unsettling and in a couple cases even emotionally devastating. Tellingly, DuVernay accomplishes these scenes with a minimum of digital effects compared to the rest of the film, and the spell is broken when the story's climax arrives inside another dark & murky CGI environment.
Unfortunately, even my enjoyment of the last act was diminished afterwards while talking to my girlfriend, who read the books as a child and re-read them a month or so ago. She liked the film a little more than me overall, but was seriously disappointed in the sequence I liked the most, as it represented what she thought was the film's most glaring missed opportunity:
SpoilerShow
Evidently, in the books, the sequence on the evil planet is marked by a pervasive, inescapable beat that follows the characters everywhere, and the way the evil consumes its victims is by getting them to succumb to its rhythm. In this film, the beat is introduced (in a scene that also featured heavily in the trailer) but just a couple minutes later it's discarded entirely and never mentioned again. The notion of a pervasive rhythm following the characters around seems inherently cinematic to me, provided the director has the imagination and commitment to pull it off. Bring a really smart composer or music editor onto the project early in the process to help you develop the sequence and you could come up with something truly special.