skygiants

I did see it tonight! And I very much liked it. (SPOILERS BELOW, which I know you're fine with but I mention it in case anyone else reads this.)







They definitely condensed a lot from the book, which on the whole I think was a good call even as I was wistful for the bell-flowers of Uriel and for Aunt Beast. (But I think it was the right call to not half-escape from IT, heal on a different planet with different creatures, go back to Camazotz again, and properly escape that time, all the while leaning into the complications of Mr. Murry's feelings about the baby son he doesn't really know and has only met as cruel and IT-possessed and Meg's feelings about her dad not being able to magically swoop in and fix everything once she'd found him.) Anyway, I realized during the WAKE UP, MEG!! bit of the confrontation that they were probably going to just meld all that into one big confrontation, which I am fine with.

IT was oversimplified into less authority, more nebulous evil, but they still tied it to very L'Engle ideas of the Shadow and the evil of the world and so forth, so I was fine with that too; it seemed like a reasonable way to work in L'Engle metaphysics without getting into "there's the Shadow and the Ecthroi, oh and Camazotz is a Shadowed planet but IT is different from the Ecthroi, but anyway--" complications. I agree with you that it made Meg's end triumph more divorced from the flaws she was supposed to be using, though. I think a couple of lines could have fixed that, though. (I also felt that that fight came down a little too hard on... I'm trying to figure out how to say this, because the triumph of love despite all and Meg's love for Charles Wallace specifically is hugely important, but in the book we have Meg's interiority. In the movie, we didn't, and the external lines were a little too close to LOVE THEM EVEN IF THEY HURT YOU for my taste for a kid's movie, at least when Meg was being flung around by evil fire-shadow(-ganglion??) tendrils.

However it was definitely a correct call to go for some vaguely neuron-y structures instead of making IT be a literal giant brain. I feel.

I liked the change to the Happy Medium a lot! It did make me think about how very many women are in the original book, though. I think the only male characters are Calvin, Charles Wallace, Mr. Murry (basically a not-damsel in distress, though slightly less so in the book), Mr. Jenkins, and various evil Camazotz guys. Granted, two of those are main characters, but then against them we have Meg, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which and Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Murry, the Happy Medium, Aunt Beast...

I liked the soundtrack a lot. It wasn't exactly subtle, but I really enjoyed it. And the visuals! Very little looked like what I imagined from the book, but I really loved nearly all of it anyway. (Exceptions: I could never really reconcile Mindy Kaling with Mrs. Who -- I wanted her to be older and with more gravitas -- which is not a fault of the casting, just something where I couldn't set my mental impression aside for the movie's. And also, the book is so very anchored in upstate NY for me that that high overhead shot of the suburban blocks with their towering palm trees was intensely disorienting.) Also, having Mrs. Whatsit change on Uriel into a smiling Fantasia plant-nudibranch-magic-carpet thing instead of a centaur was a hilarious choice which I am all in favor of. (Edit: also hilarious but totally reasonable: adding in that giant storm thing on Camazotz for ACTION!!! and Meg to get to have some more physics badassery; the running-through-the-forest bit went on a little too long and I would've liked SOME explanation of how the heck Charles Wallace missed all that, but I liked the character beats it gave us.) And in general, I thought the updating for 2018 was very very well done! The Parental Presentation About Tesseracts was hilariously Kids' Movie Scientist, but this is a kids' movie, so fair enough. And I loved how they changed the focus from Meg's glasses to Meg's hair -- it worked perfectly, I thought.

I didn't want a creepier Charles Wallace, but I know we disagree on that. :p I love Charles Wallace, and a creepier one would have felt seriously OOC to me. I did want a warmer one, though? I think this is mostly an issue of the inherent difficulties of having a very young child actor, but it felt like he shrugged off a lot of stuff too easily -- like, "Oh, hi, Meg! Anyway here's a plot point." I loved Meg so much, though, and Calvin was great too. (His family stuff was watered down a lot, which I'm kind of :/ about, but I get having to streamline, and them wanting to end on a hopeful note of "now I have the courage to talk to him about this" instead of two alcoholics of whom IIRC at least one is also abusive, which is sort of hard to tie up in a pat bow.)

Anyway yeah! I loved it a lot, and I approved of nearly all the changes from the book, and now part of me wants to reread and I definitely want an icon once people start making them. >.>