OPRAH’S LOST IN SPACE
Flying cabbages, chatty flowers and a batty tale of good vs evil — no wonder the talk show queen can’t save this sci-fi farrago
Madeleine l’engle’s bestselling sciencefiction novel a Wrinkle in Time, which was first published in 1962 and laced an old-fashioned children’s adventure with complex notions of space, time and spirituality, was long assumed to be ‘unfilmable’.
Regrettably, ava duVernay’s ambitious adaptation does little to undermine that assumption. it is satisfyingly starry, visually stimulating — and a bit of a mess.
The film owes a fair amount of its boxoffice appeal to the presence of Oprah Winfrey, who plays a benign celestial sorceress, with extravagant hair and glittery lipstick, called Mrs Which. She utters lines that could almost be a rehearsal for the 2020 presidential bid she is said to be considering. ‘if we do not act soon, evil will fall across the universe,’ she declares, solemnly.
They might have to make badges bigger and buses longer, but that’s a campaign slogan if ever i heard one.
at the heart of the story, however, is Meg Murry (Storm Reid), a bright, slightly nerdy teenager whose academic progress and general behaviour have deteriorated in the four years since her quantum physicist father, alex ( Chris Pine), went missing while investigating how something called a tesseract might propel him through space.
at school, Meg and her younger, adopted, even cleverer brother Charles Wallace (deric McCabe) are picked on mercilessly, teased for their fragile conviction that their father may return.
at home, they and their mother Kate (Gugu MbathaRaw) rub along in the long shadow of his disappearance, until one day a strange being, evidently in some sort of telepathic communication with the precocious Charles Wallace, arrives to give them hope.
ThiSis an inter-galactic fairy godmother in a dress apparently modelled on a meringue and played mostly for laughs by a red-haired Reese Witherspoon.
‘Call me Mrs Whatsit,’ she says. ‘Mrs who?’ comes the response. ‘no, Mrs Who is a billion years older,’ she explains.
never mind that abbott and Costello got there much earlier with their famous baseball routine, ‘ Who’s on First?’, the gag continues with the introduction of Mrs Who (Mindy Kaling), and Mrs Which.
Cricket-lovers know the three Ws as West indian batting giants Walcott, Worrell and Weekes.
These three Ws are another kind of bats. They sweep Meg, Charles Wallace and the one boy at school who is kind to the beleaguered Murry kids, Calvin ( levi Miller), on a magical mystery tour of far-off planets, on one of which the missing dr Murry might be languishing.
Magical mystery tour, by the way, applies rather as The Beatles meant it, as a foray into a parallel psychedelic universe, complete with perky chattering flowers and giant flying cabbages. There are moments here when the realm of children’s entertainment gets uncomfortably close to an acid trip
Fortunately, our doughty trio aren’t too freaked out by all this, partly because Oprah is spraying worldly-wise homilies, much as she does in real life.
Witherspoon’s character gets some terribly cheesy lines. ‘everyone knows that flowers are the best gossipers in the entire universe,’ she drools, which i suppose, if only to a British audience, makes her a cheesy Whatsit.
Then there’s Mrs Who, who can’t muster much in the way of original thought, but has a quotation for every occasion.
Of course, there can’t be light without darkness, and soon there is evil to contend with, in the form of a fiend known only as ‘it’, which somewhat shockingly goes and possesses Charles Wallace. Until this point the film has been cheerfully, if weirdly, chugging along as something you could take a ten-year-old to see. Suddenly it’s The Omen. Still, i expect most of this derives from l’engle’s book. duVernay and writer Jennifer lee (credits include hit disney animations Wreck-it Ralph and Frozen) try hard to inject big themes of good versus evil, the importance of belief systems in adolescence, and of self-confidence. But duVernay, who made the powerful 2014 film Selma and here becomes the first africanamerican woman to direct a really big-budget movie, doesn’t seem entirely in control of the material. The special effects, moreover, are surprisingly ropey.
HOWeVeR,i’m all in favour of giving Meg and Charles Wallace a black mother, which is certainly not how l’engle imagined the family in 1962.
Bespectacled, mixed- race teenage girls are definitely under-represented in the annals of those who’ve saved the world from evil on the big screen, so this is a welcome nudge in an unfamiliar direction.
But in too many other departments, not least coherence of narrative, a Wrinkle in Time falls disappointingly short.
TheRe’S nothing short about Pacific Rim: Uprising. its 111 minutes feel like 1,011, as duelling giant robots trample skyscrapers in vague service of yet another plot about a world on the brink of apocalypse.
every time you think the
biggest giant robot has finally vanquished all other comers, along stomps another even bigger one.
The film is a sequel to Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 shaky sci-fi blockbuster Pacific Rim, with John Boyega giving full vent to his South London accent, glottal stops and all, as Jake, wayward, wise-cracking son of Idris Elba’s character from the original.
Otherwise, the story is calculatedly stuffed with characters (and even sub-titled dialogue) designed to please Far East audiences, who were largely responsible for the first film’s healthy box-office returns.
PROFITS,not plot, dictate that Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi again plays Jake’s adopted sister, with Scott Eastwood, Clint’s boy, there to provide a slab of American beefcake. He couldn’t look or sound more like the old man, by the way, if he snarled: ‘Go ahead, make my day.’
The storyline is just as simplistic and cynical, recycling the contest between human-controlled ‘ Jaeger’ robots and vast monsters called Kaijus, with a feisty teen orphan (Cailee Spaeny) ticking another demographic as Jake’s girl sidekick.
In fairness to director Steven DeKnight, the CGI battle scenes are genuinely spectacular. If only there weren’t quite so many of them.