Thank you, A Wrinkle in Time, for reminding me what it was about kid books that made me hate them.
1. Nonsensical Magic.
My sister hates this worse than I do, but I hate it. "I think I'll be a bird now." No. Not allowed!
2. Appealing to Kids.
"Hey Phil, kids like magic. Right?" "Yeah, Mary. Kids love magic." "Cool. Okay. I'm gonna throw in a lot of stuff kids like." Kids like magic. Everyone likes magic. But kids also like stuff that doesn't suck.
3. Are you saying A Wrinkle in Time sucks?
I'm saying it was a big, boring, chunk of time-wasting fluff. It was pretty fluff. Sometimes the fluff made me ugly-cry. I liked all the, "My gift to you is your faults," or whatever stuff that was a big theme throughout the movie. I liked that a lot. Like The Greatest Showman, having confidence in being deserving of love right now, as you are, is a fantastic theme! But the rest of the blah-blah-blah... no.
4. It boils down to CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT.
Do you care about the characters?
Some of them.
Were you worried about them?
No. Because the situations they kept getting themselves into were RIDICULOUS!
To be fair, I spent a good chunk of the movie with my 5 year old in the bathroom. He kept saying he had to go, and he had been sick the day before, so I didn't want to chance it. But he also says he has to go to the bathroom when he's bored with a movie, or scared. I could hardly blame him for being either.
