A Wrinkle in Time (PG)
Disney Movies; Disney Wiki; IMDb; Rotten Tomatoes; TV Tropes; Wikia; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Disney+; Google Play; Movies Anywhere; Vudu; YouTube

This came out in 2018, but I didn't see it until 2024. It's based on the 1962 novel of the same name. Technically it's "science fantasy", but I don't have a category that specific, so I generally put such things under "science fiction". Anyway... I really wanted to like this movie a lot more than I did. I don't remember the book in great detail, but I know I liked it more than the movie. I think some liberties were taken with the movie, but I'm not sure how much that detracted from the story. I think maybe the story just works better as a book. Or maybe the writing was a bit off. I thought it felt a bit silly at times, and narratively it was kind of a jumble. Which is not to say I didn't like it. I just liked it less than I'd hoped I would.

It starts with a man named Dr. Alex Murry (Chris Pine) talking with his young daughter, Meg. But soon the story flashes forward to when Meg (Storm Reid) is 13, and her father has been missing for four years. He and his wife, Dr. Kate Murry (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), had been doing theoretical research into tesseracts, as a means of space travel using only the mind. We eventually learn that that's what had happened to Alex: he tessered to another planet, and got trapped. Also, at the start of the movie, Alex and Kate had adopted a baby named Charles Wallace (who in the book I'm pretty sure was their biological son). He's now six years old, according to Wikipedia, so I suppose Alex must have disappeared a couple years after the first scene? I dunno.

Anyway, Meg is having trouble at school, partly because of her father's disappearance, but also because she's taunted by other students. (In particular, a girl named Veronica, played by Rowan Blanchard, whom I knew from Girl Meets World.) Then one night, a strange woman named Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon) shows up at the Murrys' house, and apparently Charles Wallace already knows her. The next day, Meg and Charles Wallace are out walking, when they're joined by a boy Meg's age named Calvin. Charles Wallace leads them to the house of Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), another of his strange friends like Mrs. Whatsit. And later the three children are joined by those two women, plus another named Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey). They all tesser together to another planet to look for Alex. They don't find him at first, so they go to yet another planet, where they consult with a seer called the Happy Medium (Zach Galifianakis), who helps them locate Alex. It turns out he's on the planet Camazotz, where he was trapped by an evil force called "the It", a darkness which is spreading across the universe. The Mrs. want to return to Earth and talk with Kate, and formulate a plan, but Meg wants to go to Camazotz immediately, and she somehow redirects their tesser to that planet. Well, they all go through a lot of trouble to find and rescue Alex, and in the process Charles Wallace gets possessed (or something) by the It, so Meg has to find a way to release him from its control. And a bunch of other stuff happens that I'm not going to detail. Suffice to say, the It is eventually defeated, and everyone, including Alex, returns home to Earth.

So... the movie has some really good visual effects. And it has the bones of a good story, even if the actual flesh of the story is somewhat wonky. I appreciated what the movie was trying to do, and I don't think it completely failed. It just... well, like I said, I think it works better as a book.