Sunny Days in Heaven
Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven


Tuesday, January 11, 2005  

A Wrinkle in Time

Here's the description at Amazon
of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time:

Everyone in town thinks Meg Murry is volatile and dull-witted, and that her younger brother, Charles Wallace, is dumb. People are also saying that their physicist father has run off and left their brilliant scientist mother. Spurred on by these rumors and an unearthly stranger, the tesseract-touting Mrs Whatsit, Meg and Charles Wallace and their new friend Calvin O'Keefe embark on a perilous quest through space to find their father. In doing so, they must travel behind the shadow of an evil power that is darkening the cosmos, one planet at a time. This is no superhero tale, nor is it science fiction, although it shares elements of both. The travelers must rely on their individual and collective strengths, delving deep within themselves to find answers.

A well-loved classic and 1963 Newbery Medal winner, Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time is sophisticated in concept yet warm in tone, with mystery and love coursing through its pages. Meg's shattering, yet ultimately freeing, discovery that her father is not omnipotent provides a satisfying coming-of-age element. Readers will feel a sense of power as they travel with these three children, challenging concepts of time, space, and the triumph of good over evil.


I pasted the above to save myself the trouble of setting up my brief review of the movie that was made by Disney of the book.

My wife loves the book, but I never had an interest, so I watched the movie and found it tendentious.

I appreciate the Christian undertones and allegory here and there, but the movie is preachy and tired. It wants to inspire wonder and insight, but was slow, didactic, and dated in manner. The CGI was a bit cheap but ocassionally gorgeous, yet nevertheless failed to excite the imagination.

Fantasy sci-fi premises are harder to establish since reality is altered so dramatically for the people in them that they are forever having to say, "Whoa, how'd this happen, and why is everything so weird now?"

Whereas Tolkien's fantasy was not a departure for the characters into a different reality, but simply an adventure in their own.

Fantasy stories also more clearly reflect the psychological condition of the author in the Jungian sense that everything is a projection of the writer's inner struggle being worked out loud.

Some writers' conditions are more interesting and complex than others like Blake and Shakespeare as opposed to C.S.Lewis and Mrs. Engle.

Anyway, it's a movie worth showing to kids and viewing yourself, but don't expect much from it.

posted by Mark Butterworth | 3:46 PM |

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