I saw A Wrinkle in Time last night. My wife enjoyed it.
I hated it. Hated the whole thing. If I’d been alone, I’d have just walked out on it.
Things just happened in the plot, which made no logical sense. There was no feeling of consistency or reason to this universe, the writers had a whim and made it happen on the screen. There was all this New Age crap throughout — yeah, there was “quantum”, and there was “vibration”, and wouldn’t you know it, the secret ingredient that made it possible for Chris Pine to teleport (oh, excuse me, “tesser”) 91 billion light years to a conveniently habitable planet was the “vibration of love”.
Worst movie I’ve seen this year. Go ahead, fight me.
they shouldn’t have removed the Christianity from it. I rather have a specific theology than new age crap.
To be fair, the book wasn’t much better.
I tried to read the book in junior high fifty-*mumble* years ago. Even gave it a few tries as it seemed to be very popular. Never made it even a quarter of the way through–and I was a budding Science Fiction fanatic. I just assumed the movie would be terrible.
Don’t forget the horrible editing. The first 5 minutes of the movie set up a scene that must have been cut and left the characters doing stuff that made no sense for no reason.
I really enjoyed the book as a child and still do – but adding in all the stuff about the parents and vibrations of love, and then adding ridiculous action scenes to a story that’s more contemplative and suspenseful just turned it into a huge thumbs down for me.
I do hope it’s really successful despite all that, because alt right haters and internet trolls wanted it to fail. And the costume design was spectacular.
I loved it. I don’t know why, but it hit all the right buttons for me. I cried, even. I f it’s not your thing, that’s cool, too. We don’t have to all like the same things.
Well, I haven’t seen it but I don’t think it purports to be scientifically accurate . . .
This was my problem with the books, which get worse as they go on.
The best thing about the books, and the reason I think they were so popular and important, was that their protagonist is a likeable, smart girl with a lot of emotional strength whose parents love and support her and encourage her interest in science. Given the first book came out in 1962, this was pretty revolutionary.
The Christian eschatology is a bit annoying to a non-believer, but it’s layered under so much fantastical camouflage that it’s easy to ignore.
But by gum, those endings! Every time, the final resolution is a child stating their love for someone and the big bad evil shrivels up and goes away. I am all for stories about the powerful effect of love, but these books turned it into a simple magic spell that will solve every situation. Not only is this bad dramatic writing — how is anything a threat if you can just express your love for someone and the threat evaporates? — it’s also a terrible moral. Sure it’s good to encourage people to tell loved ones that you love them, but it’s a terrible message to instil that doing so fixes everything, a tool routinely exploited by abusive partners. (Not to mention the implication that everything evil that ever befell anyone could have been avoided if only they’d cast the magic spell “I love you”. Could have fixed the Holocaust, the Rwandan Massacre, the Khmer Rouge…)
I worked really hard to get through the series, but could not tolerate any more after the third book. (Which is probably a good thing. Reading the wikipedia plot summary of the fourth makes me think it’d make me throw up. A plot resolution that relies on scientific empiricists learning to save themselves from death in the Noachian flood by making themselves believe that virtual unicorns are real!!!)
It really is a pity because 50+ years later there still aren’t a lot of YA books that present a positive role model for scientifically curious young women.
This.
Although I was younger than Meg and constantly fed crap about being super-smart, Charles Wallace was only somewhat compelling to me. Meg was the more compelling character, and except for a few aspects of her relationship with Calvin, I identified much more strongly with her. She made the book.
I enjoyed the book in 4th grade. When I also enjoyed The Hobbit. Read them both with my daughter a few years ago, and they’re crap. But that’s no excuse for making a bad movie. I read that silly book about the polar bears and the witches (Golden Compass, or somesuch), thought it was shite, but the movie was reasonably entertaining.
It would have been entirely possible to make a fun movie from the baseline of A Wrinkle In Time. That they didn’t is an embarrassment.
Nobody should ever expect a Hollywood adaptation of a book to be better than the book. It may happen sometimes, but don’t expect it. And when it does happen it’ll usually be an accident.
Hey, when is Hollywood going to ruin The Weirdstone of Brisingamen? It’s time they fucked that one up.
@ Marcus Ranum:
MASH is the only example I can think of where the movie was better than the book, and the TV show was better than the movie. (It’s probably the only example I ever experienced in chronological order, too…)
anbheal @9:
Now them‘s fightin words, pilgrim.
I read the book in the 60 s . Can’t remember. Theres two movies to watch. (For me). Both Disney s. Sent to library for refresh book. All this on the strength of your wife’s approval. The strong reaction from both of you makes me curious.
jack16
@12 Battle Axe
Movie better than book. “Blade Runner” was much better than “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”. In retrospect the flying cars really bother me but I didn’t notice at the watching. (The second version, not so good.)
jack16
I haven’t seen it, but if they didn’t mangle the book too much I’m just glad “Camazotz” will be part of the pop culture consciousness the next time I have to explain my refusal to live anywhere with an HOA.
Reminiscing . . . TV better than movie. There was a version of “No Time for Sergeants” that was much better than the movie. Don Knots just didn’t make the grade. (He’s very good else where so it may not be his fault.) The TV actor skillfully underplayed the part. My late mother and I laughed heartily.
jack16
Those books were never translated to Swedish. Later, Sam J. Lundwall made a great effort to get SF and fantasy classics translated, and he also made sure we got to read some East European novels, like the Strugatsky brothers’ books.
Speaking of films, Tarkovsky actually pulled off two good film versions, even if his vision was slightly different from that of Lem and the Strugatskys.
If you want to re-visit a children’s book that is not crap, try “The Face in the Frost”.
– – –
Strong female character: Pippa Longstocking.
– – –
Fun TV parody of children’s books; “Five Go Mad in Dorset”.
with Stephen Fry.
Film better than book: Tarkovsky’s Stalker is better than Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic. (@birgerjohansson, what do you reckon?)
Film unexpectedly not too bad, even though book is infinitely better: The Name of the Rose
@Jack 16:
Sammy Jackson, who played Will Stockdale on TV, had a bit part in the movie. When the sheriff is bringing Andy Griffith into the bus depot in handcuffs, he yells: “Look! They’re bringing a guy in in bracelets!”
Of course you shouldn’t feel bad if you liked it and I didn’t. My wife liked it, too — I am not planning a divorce any time soon.
It may be that what it took to like it was to identify strongly with Meg. She was a likeable character, and it would be good to see more girls as strong central characters. I didn’t. Also, I took a very strong dislike to Charles Wallace — the actor was a hammy unpleasant child actor portraying a totally unlikeable and unbelievable character.
@12
There’s a ton of films better than their source material. Godfathers, Silver lining playbook, High Noon, Brokeback Mountain, Sideways, The Green Mile, Shawshank redemption etc all improve upon their source material.
Hell stuff like Tom Jones or Dangerous Liaisons are better in some ways as well.
I might be alone on this point but I almost always find adaptations to be as good as the various literary properties.
MS@23 — I agree that there are quite a few adaptations that improve on their source material, but as a proportion it seems pretty low to me…and especially when you consider just how awful the worst adaptations can be (to your list of improvements, let me counter with Enemy Mine, The Cat in the Hat, Memoirs of a Geisha, Howard the Duck, Inspector Gadget, Scooby-Doo, The Avengers (the 1998 botch of the old UK TV series), The Scarlet Letter, Bicentennial Man, I Robot, The Time Machine (2002), The Hobbit (triple score bonus on that one), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, From Hell, The Human Stain, I Am Legend, Johnny Mnemonic, World War Z…the list goes on).
Discussions like this always entertains me. Things that are completely subjective argued as though they are objective.
@chrislawson:
And if Blade Runner was better than Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that’s totally balanced by Total Recall vs. We Can Remember it for You Wholesale.
I’ve still never seen the series of The Man in the High Castle, because I don’t get NetFlix, or Amazon, or WTH it is….
@YOB:
We’re just having fun–nobody’s going to take up arms about it.
It’s not like anybody said Dune was a good adaptation!
TVRBoK @12:
Alan Alda delendus est.
@The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
Woah there now. Lets not get carried away.
Seriously though, my comment was *supposed* to have been a bit snarky as it applies to this thread which may have not come through. As it applies to some other threads in other places, maybe not so snarky at all.
;)
You know what they say, “De omnibus non ets disputandum”. That’s Latin for, “Don’t get into a fight with the bus driver”.
I read the reviews for this movie and I was touched at the sheer effort each critic made to find something to praise. They all really wanted to like this movie, and they sort of could, but barely. It was rather touching.
Not to mention The Crow.
It’s too bad they never made any sequels…well, maybe just as well.
@Jack16
I think the only Philip K. Dick adaption that was as good as the source material was not Blade Runner but A Scanner Darkly. I normally hate anything that Keanu Reeves is involved in but that movie was very well done. Usually Dick is adapted all wrong.
Additional note: … On review believe I saw the U. S. Steel Hour version of “No Time for Sergeants” in March 1955. Now available on You Tube. Sure looks different today! Still enjoy the bathroom salute.
jack16
Wow! After my remark @17 all you guys jumped in with stuff that’ll take me a week (weeks?) to see. Already got my Ohio library loaded with requests.
jack16
Then there are cases like the above mentioned Memoirs of a Geisha where the book was such a wretched mess, it is amazing that anyone thought to make a movie.
Rob Grigjanis #13
Amen.
anna@32 — Keanu Reeves is an actor who, if the role is right, can be absolutely perfect, but if the role is wrong will make an absolute hash of it. Nobody could have done Bill and Ted better than Reeves. He’s also been excellent in Neon Demon, My Own Private Idaho, River’s Edge and (although they’re not exactly showcases for great acting) he’s serviceable in the Matrix movies, Speed and John Wick. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine any actor who would have been worse in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And he’s not much better in Johnny Mnemonic.
YOB@25 — I’m not sure where you got the idea that we all thought our opinions were objectively true about what movies and books we like.
There were a lot of problems with the movie. The one that cheesed me off the most was making IT the Big Bad. In the books, the enemy is the Darkness, described in the second and third books as entities that want to destroy the universe and return it to its primordial formlessness. IT and it’s dominion over Camazotz was a symptom of the Darkness, not the cause. That was kind of the point: the fight against the Darkness was as old as the universe and would take the universe’s lifetime to fight. I think the movie lost a huge amount of its potential impact by changing that.
Speaking of which, what happened to all the people on Camazotz? Were they killed when IT was killed? Did they exist at all, or were they just part of IT’s ever-changing matrix? The movie leaves all that very ambiguous, leading us to consider the possibility that Meg committed genocide against an entire planet.
Very Reverend Battleax —
PK Dick is a bit of a mixed bag at the movies. On the one hand, cinema is almost the perfect medium to explore his ideas. (I’d argue that video games are even better due their ability to play with the idea of control. There’s a famous moment in Bioshock that would have sat absolutely perfectly in a PKD scenario.)
So we get good films like Blade Runner, the original Total Recall and serviceable films like Screamers that, even if they manipulate and modify the story (and not always for the best), at least stick to Dickian themes. Apparently the original ending of Total Recall made it abundantly clear that the protagonist was out of his mind rather than a brave hero but it got canned by the studio.
But then we have films that want to explore the PKD worldview but don’t have the courage to follow through. And I’d put Minority Report in that category. The premise is pure PKD, but the last third undermines everything Dick stood for as a writer.
@40
Minority Report does have courage in its convictions. It’s just not PKD’s convictions but Spielberg’s. This is one of the things that annoy me about this conversation. There’s no reason why a film has to show fidelity to its source material. It’s very possible for a film to be in a stance that’s different than wanting to be faithful. Say what you want about something like Starship Troopers’ quality; It’s problems don’t stem from unfaithfulness to the book as it’s clearly meant as a satirical jab at Heinlein.
@24
Your mileage will vary but I can count on one hand the number of films I consider bad because they mishandled the source material. Something like The Cat in the Hat is terrible but it’s just a bad film for so many reasons that it’s beside the point to worry about its adaptation. The vast majority of films I have seen based on something and I have experienced said something all make reasonable stabs at changing because of medium constraints.
It’s also quite possible to have a very unfaithful adaptation that still produces a good work. There’s no version of Sweeney Todd staged in the 20th century that is a good representation of A String of Pearls (the penny dreadful the scenario comes from). It’s silly to argue that the musical is bad because it’s not like the book.
I just want to chime in and say that I found Blade Runner to be an incredibly boring movie. Also, the part where Harrison Ford forced himself on the female replicant was really unpleasant.
I haven’t read the book, nor seen the movie. But, if the above is a fair summary, I won’t be doing either. I don’t think a movie has to be totally scientifically realistic but, if it’s going to include pseudoscience and newage (rhymes with “sewage” and stands for “New Age”) nonsense, I know that I’m going to be too annoyed to enjoy it no matter how otherwise entertaining it might have been.
I know it’s called “science fiction” for a reason, but I don’t think that reason should include that it is inconsistent with, and contradictory to, our present level of scientific knowledge, let alone beyond the realms of possibility.
Mike Smith@40 — sure, a film doesn’t have to treat its source material with deference to be good. Thank goodness The Godfather ditched about 30% of the source novel.
But the problem I have with Minority Report is that it sets up a Dickian scenario than completely abandons it in the end for a much more stupid story. In the end, it has nothing of interest to say about its own premise other than Tom Cruise is too cool to be a bad guy and which means the plot resolution has to be the destruction of a conspiracy which is not helped by the conspiracy making no sense at all. (For those who watch closely, it turns out that Tom Cruise is being set up because he knows something that he only finds out because he was set up. If the villain had never framed Cruise, there would have been no reason to frame Cruise.)
As for Spielberg’s convictions, I think they work really well in some movies (E.T., Jaws, Jurassic Park) but they really screwed up AI, Empire of the Sun and other movies because his sentimentality was at odds with those stories (even Schindler’s List suffers from his arch sentimentality at the end; fortunately it’s a strong enough film to be great despite that one misstep). It’s particularly bad with his adaptations because I think he gets attracted to stories that he’s not constitutionally suited to tell. It’s better when he develops his own projects.
The pacing was the biggest issue for me. It felt overly padded at the beginning, and then too quickly abbreviated at the end – when the final climactic event happened, my reaction was “Oh that’s it? That was it? Okay”. Some of the character beats didn’t land for me as well, which is a pity because the child actors really were doing their best with what they had (especially a lot of the stilted dialogue).
42 @ microraptor When did the Harrison Ford character force himself on a replicant in Blade Runner? I’ve recently seen it and do not remember it at all, unless of course, if you are referring to the new one which i haven’t seen.
There was a scene where he has one of the female replicants and says “tell me to kiss you.”
And it goes on from there.
“There’s a ton of films better than their source material.”
But “SciFi” movies seem to be reliably worse than the novels the are based on in general.
The only two such movies I can point to are “Contact”, which is at least not worse than the book, and “2010” which I thought was better than. “Dune”, which was playing at the same time as “2010” was horrible, abysmally worse than the book. In fact I went to “2010” a few days after I saw “Dune” to clear the stench from my brain. It worked!
As always, these are my *opinions*. Yours may differ and that’s fine by me.
Opposable thumbs @ 20:
Yes, Tarkovsky took the film way beyond what the Strugatskys imagined.
I would like to see a film version of Strugatskys’ very PKD-style “Definitely Maybe”.
– – – –
Dune had these annoying voice-overs about what the characters were thinking. It annoyed me so much that the other flaws almost passed unnoticed. Almost. And the baddies levitating and laughing in the most annoying way possible.
There was also some New Age ish stuff in Star Trek Discovery (cosmic fungus connected to everything, probably inspired by stuff like this) and the new movie Annihilation (DNA gets “refracted”, just like light forming rainbows!).
Oh ya, and Prometheus. Infamous Ancient Aliens nonsense that throws out any sensible view of human evolution. I try to pretend that movie doesn’t exist, even if I enjoyed it in theaters.
@39, Gregory in Seattle
On the other hand, why waste such a great premise on a human in makeup!
Not going to dive too deep into this one, but I have to address one point…
PZ @ 22:
I found how much the three children reminded me of people I know distracting. In point of fact, Charles Wallace actually looked and sounded very much like I did at that age, though I was less inclined to sweater vests.
So… you can not like him, you can not like the performance, but TRUST ME children like that are very real.
chrislawson @44
But isn’t that a classical theme? And by classical, I mean going back to Ancient Greece. The villain is told the future and tries to stop it, only to bring it about through their own efforts. In LotR, Galadriel warns Sam about that sort of thing re the visions in her mirror. Although in that case he doesn’t try to stop it and it happens anyway. Prophecy’s a real bastard that way.
Colin J — if that had been the theme of the movie it could have worked quite well, but no, the villain in this case did not have access to future information about our hero nor did the villain have any reason to suspect our hero would know the Dastardly Secret. This was a case of bad plotting, not classic Greek tragic structure. It’s a pity because what the villain does to set up our hero was very clever. If only they’d given him a sensible motivation to go with his machinations.