'A Wrinkle In Time' Spoiler Review: A Heartbreaking Misfire With A Powerful Burden

The best aspect of A Wrinkle in Time is its message, which can be boiled down to Oprah Winfrey's line "Be a warrior." The line isn't my favorite way of summing up the film's message, which I think could be more aptly said as "you matter."

Indeed, the concept of mattering is central to the story, and it's where the film's heart lies. In my adult head, I could see what wasn't working thematically and where scenes needed better direction, better conceptualization, and more attention. But Meg Murry's (Storm Reid) journey towards finding herself hit home with me in a personal way, in a way the child in me could recognize and appreciate.

I'm sure that if I was a 13-year-old, I'd be all over this movie simply because of Meg. Even though I grew up during the '90s, which had plenty of black programming, I still never really saw myself, a girl who was intensely unsure of herself, insecure, and self-degrading. I can honestly say I hated myself growing up, just like Meg, and like her, I wanted to come back to myself as someone different. I wanted to be the girl that I thought boys liked. I wanted to be the girl that would be seen as popular and not just "smart." I didn't want to be a dork.

If I'd seen Meg's journey as a kid, I would have felt a lot more confident about myself, especially with regards to matters of the heart. I would have realized that I had everything I needed to be a self-assured, vibrant, attractive person. People can forget how important it is for tweens and teens to see that the attributes they hate most about themselves can actually be the attributes that attract people the most. Seeing Meg get complimented by Calvin (Levi Miller), someone she considers out of her league, is special since it's he's complimenting the two things black and biracial girls are often told aren't beautiful – her intelligence and her coily, non-Eurocentric hair. I feel a lot of girls will come away from this film feeling like they can finally do away with their fantasies of being "the cool girl," since as we see in the film, the cool girl (Rowan Blanchard) has her own set of problems, too.

Even better is seeing Meg slowly learn how to stand up for herself and how to love herself. The quote from Rumi that acts as a driving force throughout the film – "The wound is the place where the Light enters you," is something I needed to hear as my adult self. Too often, we forget that all of our emotional baggage is cluttering up the spot where we can actually find ourselves. Like Meg, we're often too afraid to actually look in those dark spaces and get to the answers. I guess to that end, the line "be a warrior" makes sense; we have to be warriors of our own lives in order to master ourselves. That's basically what this intergalactic journey was for Meg; a journey of self-discovery and self-mastery.

In short, the importance of A Wrinkle in Time can't be understated. It is, without a doubt, an important film. But its importance shouldn't be measured by our adult standards. It needs to be measured by the message it hopes to instill in kids, especially girls who are vulnerable to all types of societal propaganda about what it means to be a woman. This film wants all kids to grow up as self-empowered, confident warriors of the Light, who fight for what's right even when it's uncomfortable or unpopular to do so. Regardless of what you think about the film, this is a message that can only do good for its young viewers.

However, this film can be viewed from both the eyes of a child and the eyes of an adult. So it's time to switch from my kid point of view to my adult one. And boy, does my adult self have a lot to say.

Fantasy can suffer from the conceit that nothing needs to make sense because it's "fantasy." But in truth, fantasy stories still work like any other story; they use ground rules to give the viewer or reader structure and, as the term implies, ground them in their new environments. Take the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for example. Even though it's a fantasy, it's completely grounded in a detailed world with its own set of politics and social structures. A more flighty film, Luc Besson's The Fifth Element, plays a little more into fantasy cliche of "anything goes," but still, there's enough backstory to situate you in a world in which a strange woman is the missing key to the universe.

Unfortunately, A Wrinkle in Time fails to set up any ground rules. We know we're supposed to be having fun on an intergalactic trip, but we don't know how we're doing it or where we are half of the time. We never understand the true importance of these worlds. We never get lost in the beauty or even the horror of it all; the closest we come to that is on the verdant planet Uriel, where Meg and her compatriots are treated to a field of talking flowers. But our time on the planet doesn't amount to much; as we're looking at the world with Meg and her friends via a flight on Mrs. Whatsit's back, the flight doesn't actually amount to anything. It ends as Calvin falls off Mrs. Whatsit and is buoyed by the flowers. Our exploration is cut short, and our ability to get fully immersed is limited.

Adventures on these worlds are supposed to be the meat of the film, but annoyingly, they are hastily set up. The worlds we go to are basically empty sets, and much of the magic that could have been imbued in these worlds is missing. We don't even know how these worlds work, such as Camazotz, the more mercurial planet we visit, which changes its guise from a 1950s nightmarescape to an overcrowded beach. Sure, it's to trick Meg, Calvin, and her brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe). But usually when characters are trapped in living environments meant to deceive them, the environment turns into something they might be familiar with or somehow have some connection to. Camazotz doesn't do this; it draws scenarios out of thin air and expects us to go along with it. Not to compare it to Star Wars or Star Trek, but both of those properties go to great lengths to make their unrealistic worlds feel lived-in and tactile. Perhaps Besson's Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a more apt comparison; despite it being a box office failure, it still did its best to immerse its audience in a world unlike any they've seen.

We're told characters like the Mrs., including the quote-attributing Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling) and the Happy Medium (Zach Galifianakis) are mystical beings, but we never know why they are such or how they came to be. We never know why the It, the bacteria-like villain in the movie, wants to take over people's inner light. We don't even know how tessering works, or why it works, or how Meg's dad figured it out. We don't know a lot of things, and it's frustrating. Nothing ever makes sense, and it would have been a relief if just something, at some point, followed some rules.

But there are none, and I was left feeling more and more frustrated the more the film progressed. Yes, my kid at heart was having fun with the messages of the film, and to the film's credit, scenes involving spreading that message are the most powerful. But the adult me was mad. Where was the magic I was promised? Where were the thrills I was led to believe I would get? I was angry that I was let down by the film. But I was even angrier that it was DuVernay who had let me down.

This film, and DuVernay herself, have a lot of pressure riding on them, and I hoped for DuVernay to turn this one out, if only so I wouldn't have to be faced with the hard task of discussing the unfair burden put on black and POC-led films, the burden of being perfect in order to succeed, while films with white leads just have to be average to be considered successful.

The fear is that a multitude of bad reviews will plague A Wrinkle in Time and prevent Disney and other big studios from taking chances on films featuring non-traditional casts and directors. Clearly, that's been weighing heavily on my heart and mind as I've written this review.

A lot of the pressure would be off the film – and by extension, reviewers like me – if Hollywood simply allowed films made by all people, featuring all people, to exist. DuVernay should be given the grace and space to fail, and to fail spectacularly. Michael Bay fails spectacularly all the time! And yet he still gets employed. Colin Trevorrow fails – Jurassic World wasn't that great and is often downright regressive – and yet he was given the opportunity to direct a Star Wars (a project he has since departed). Steven Spielberg, someone we typically think of as moviemaking teflon, has had flops, and yet studios still flock to him for films. I could go on and on, but you get the idea – these directors all have something in common, and it's what differentiates them from an Ava DuVernay. White men get second chances; POC creators and women creators rarely do.

If there were more A Wrinkle in Times out there, I could just review this without caring about the impact of my words. If Hollywood were truly egalitarian, there'd be a plethora of films out there that tell stories about and for everyone. So while A Wrinkle in Time ultimately loses the battle of filmmaking, it still wins the war of instilling hope into younger generations. Little girls who love film can see DuVernay doing great things and start to dream higher of themselves. They can also look to Meg and see how Meg overcame her difficulties and take those lessons into their own lives. It also puts pressure on Disney and other companies to start making more films that cater to more people.

A Wrinkle in Time might not be a good film, but it's a good starting point for more films like it.