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From the Page to the Screen – A Wrinkle in Time

A Wrinkle in Time is a 1962 fantasy children’s novel written by Madeleine L’Engle. It is considered to be one of the best family fantasy literary works and is still considered a classic. Even though many would proclaim it to be unfilmable, it finally got a film adaptation in the 2010s.

THE FILM ADAPTATION

The film was released in 2018 by Disney and directed by Ava DuVernay. It received very mixed or even mediocre reviews and it was a terrible flop at the box office. Whereas many would disagree, I personally find it to be a solid, respectable adaptation that didn’t deserve what happened to it.

PLOT

In terms of storytelling, the film struggled in its second act as it was rather silly and exceedingly messy. But the first and the third act definitely were pretty good. The film’s mostly very faithful to the novel which I appreciated, but again no matter how well they did the job of adapting it, the novel still remains difficult, maybe even impossible to translate to film.

WINNER – BOOK

CHARACTERIZATION

I actually really liked what they did with the characters in the film. They were honestly all so well developed and mostly they were well cast with Storm Reid shining in the role of Meg. I liked the protagonist, Calvin, Charles Wallace and the witches are fine, but the villain was underutilized and not as memorable as in the book.

WINNER – BOOK

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EMOTION

This one definitely has to go to the film. Don’t get me wrong, the novel is emotional and it has its touching moments for sure, but the film is more sentimental and especially that final third was quite rewarding emotionally.

WINNER – FILM

THEMES

Although the movie explored the theme of self-love and learning to accept yourself for who you are so well, it was otherwise slight whereas the novel also explored the difficulties of communicating through words, the inadequacy of explanations and conformity.

WINNER – BOOK

TECHNICAL ASPECTS

This easily goes to the movie as in my opinion Madeleine L’Engle’s writing style is not great. She rushes through things and cannot properly describe the imagery. The movie, however, is well shot, scored and fueled by terrific special effects.

WINNER – FILM

BOOK 3: FILM 2

This is one of the instances where the movie did not fail to capture the book’s imagination as they faithfully and very solidly brought this difficult to adapt story to the big screen. That’s why it ended up being not too weaker than the source material itself and thus an incredibly underrated movie.