AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH *flailing*

[anagramofbrat]

So Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time is in my top five for books I would read and reread and reread growing up. I still have my Bantam paperback edition somewhere, but it's so old and decrepit that I'm pretty sure the scotch tape holding it together in some places has aged to the point of giving up. It's funny because someone gave me the book when I was seven or eight and I distinctly remember failing to get into it at all the first couple of attempts, and then for some reason the third time I finally made it past Mrs Which (chapter 3) and stayed up all night to finish it, cursing myself for an idiot the whole way. After which I snatched up A Wind In the Door and loved the hell out of that one too. (Interestingly enough I did not care for A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and even though I was excited when it came out Many Waters disappointed me as well. (Mostly because I just didn't care about Sandy and Dennys nearly as much as I did Meg and Charles Wallace... which I still pronounce in my head as "Wallance" even though I realized I'd been misreading it years ago.)

That said... I tend to be very forgiving of adaptations to the point where I look at people that are all like "yes but the movie failed to match the pictures in my head so I wish it didn't have the same title because ITS NOT THE SAME STORY" like they sprouted third noses. I mean... OF COURSE it doesn't match what you imagined, you didn't make the movie or TV show, chill out.

I kinda groaned when I heard Disney was taking another stab at AWiT, because hoo boy, the miniseries they did about 15 years ago was pretty dire. While I thought casting the weird creepy kid from The Ring as Charles was inspired, the rest of it was a waste of Alfre Woodard. (To be fair, it was only distributed by Disney... but still.) And then I heard Ava DuVerney was directing and I was like OOOHHHH OKAY lets see how this goes. And then I shook my head as the Greater Racist Internet lost their shit that they cast a black girl as Meg which... OMG I have feels about that, namely that I am 100% okay with one of my fictional childhood heroes LOOKING LIKE ME, I would have killed for that as a kid. (White people, get a goddamn grip, you can stand to let us have a few of your characters out of the bazillion that represent you.) And then I kinda completely forgot about it until there were some production photos released this week ahead of D23, and I was like "wait, Oprah, Mindy Kaling and Reese Witherspoon as the Mrs Ws? Okay..." And then the teaser dropped this afternoon and HOLY SHIT.

Watch on YouTube

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG. I literally started hyperventilating with excitement the first time I watched it.



So several things that sold me right away:

• INTERESTING AS HELL SONG CHOICE FOR THIS TRAILER. It appears to be a heavily edited, sped up and remixed cut of Emily Browning's cover of Sweet Dreams (are Made of This). I've seen complaints that it doesn't work with the material but I disagree, especially with the addition of the metronome ticking underneath it. (No, it's not a great cover by itself, but using the original with Annie Lennox's distinctive vocals I think would have been hella distracting.) Thematically? I can't put my hands on my copies of A Wrinkle In Time and/or A Wind in the Door, but a fair bit of Meg's character development in both are her going from complete denial about the extraordinary events happening around her ("Is this a dream or is this real?" "What is real?" being an exchange that happens with her and another character in the second book) to accepting and learning the rules of the altered realities she is thrust into... and then besting whatever evil she's up against by loopholing said rules.
  
  Also this from later in the song (which isn't sung in the trailer but...):
  
  Some of them want to use you
  Some of them want to get used by you
  Some of them want to abuse you
  Some of them want to be abused
  
  If this doesn't sound like IT. I mean hi, IT is the Happiest Sadist...Okay I may be overthinking this one. I like the song choice, tl;dr. Moving on.



• Meg! I absolutely love her already. While the trailer doesn't get into WHY she's an isolated loner kid at her school, nor does it really show Charles Wallace at all, I love the moments of this kid's performance that we did see. Also yay for Meg's unruly curly hair. Also again, big yay for her looking like... well, me. Because YES.



• Mrs Who's glasses. The Mrs Ws are OTT in a completely different way than they were depicted in the books. Here they all look like a runway challenge at the end of a RuPaul's Drag Race episode. This is not a complaint. The Mrs W's are celestial beings playing dressup as humans and going way too far in the process. OTT for the 2010s looks way different from OTT for 1960-something, so I'm okay with this update. But Who's glasses caught me in that they are faceted and rhinestoned lorgnettes that snap open and closed like a switchblade. a) Want, like now. b) that's going to play out interestingly during the bit where the kids actually find Mr. Murray... who seems to imprisoned not in a crystal column, but in an outtake from "Hotline Bling".
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  IT used to call me on IT's cell phone...
  
  
  



• Camazotz! The smash cut to the kids bouncing their balls in unison made every hair along my spine stand on end. DYAAAAGH. Which means they did it absolutely correctly.



• The Ixchel! Not at ALL what I pictured Aunt Beast's people to look like, but I am intrigued. (Though upon rewatches I do wonder how the Murrays and Calvin are going to relate to aliens that look like AT-ATs with too many legs.)

So yeah, cautiously excited about this. And wildly curious about (and slightly terrified by) things that were NOT addressed in the trailer, like:

• Charles Wallace. You see him a few times in passing in the trailer but he doesn't speak (weirdly appropriate) and you don't see Meg's connection to him much if at all. (Most of her appearances show her interacting with her father or with Calvin.)



• The Happy Medium. I did not realize we see them in the trailer but apparently Zach Galifianakis is playing them? Unsure whether this is a complete gender swap or what's going on but... just please don't fuck up my Medium. The 2003 series take on her was terrible.



• The Man with the Red Eyes is credited as "Red," and you see him for a split second in close up and that shot is like... what.



• Mrs Whatsit. She is the one who gets the most to do and say in the book because "she's much better at verbalizing" than the other two... and yet Mrs Which does all the talking in the trailer, which... Okay I get Mrs Which is freakin OPRAH but I wonder if this is traileritis or an actual change from the story.



• Is Fortinbras still the best dog in science fiction? Or even in this movie?

So I would say A+++ super hyped here, with a note of caution cause... I've been burnt by trailers before. But I think Ava DuVerney's got this one.

March can't get here fast enough.

EDIT: The omission of the period after "Mrs" for Whatsit, Who and Which was a stylistic choice by the author. Meg's mother, when referred to as Mrs. Murray, has the period. Just in case anyone was feeling like grammar checking me here.

Comments

[blueraccoon]

I am super excited about this and had somehow missed even knowing there was going to be a movie so literally this was the first thing I heard about it.

The husband has some concerns with the way they're setting up Dr. Murry at the beginning--the point is that he's just *gone* and no one knows where or why. If we give him backstory early on, a lot of that ominous sense is missing. I'm hoping this was a trailer edit and not the way it'll show in the film.

I think casting Meg as someone of color is phenomenal and I love it.

Also now I want to reread all the books...

[justphoenix]

It's been many many years since I read the book. Trailer looks good though.