A Wrinkle in Time (2018 Movie)

[Totenkindly]

Getting back to this briefly too....

...L'Engle was really about how zealous rationality can stamp out creativity and individuality. This was a big deal at the time, with the onset of machinery and science as the new evolution of man (CS Lewis was hitting this kind of thing too in This Hideous Strength). Meg is disliked because she is an individual. Jenkins sees her as a misfit because she can't conform to the school structure. The Murrays live on the offskirts of town. The Trio is a bunch of oddballs who are also unique wonderful and powerful. CW is a genius who puts people off because he can't be in a box even if he tried. The thing is, Meg feels ashamed because of her lack of conformity -- yet she's stubbornly unable to conform.

Anyway, this is why Camazotz is so structured -- it is humanity compressed into a small box and made to conform. Evil is slavery to conformity based on the severely "rational," where humans are reduced to cogs in an efficient machine. This is why IT is a brain... and sure I accept changing the image (it could have simply been something very mechanical and computerized, forcing everyone into its binary 1's and 0's so to speak), but they really changed the nature of the film to something more vague, which resulted in issues with the resolution of the film. Basically, they needed a skilled writer to take any theme changes and really hone the script to focus on it.

IT is not The Shadow in L'Engle's universe (although the movie makes IT so). IT is just a manifestation of The Shadow -- it's Camazotz's particular manifestation. In order to make a perfectly efficient world where everyone has a very defined role and place and things hum along beautifully, individuality is stamped out. Everything is perfectly stamped, measured, and processed. The Shadow is actually that which destroys. It is embodied in creatures called the Echthroi in later books, who are creatures of non-existence, vacuums that devour and nullify life. The Shadow wants to expunge; the Light wants to illuminate and "bring into being." The Shadow can express itself in various ways; one is by the destruction of individuality as on Camazotz.

The fascinating thing is how humans still need some amount of structure, we crave it as I guess all life does. In the first battle with IT, the kids try to use times tables and rhymes to break the repetitive programming IT is trying to impose on them, but those things are still structured and cannot in the end be used to resist IT.

Love is the one thing that is unstructured, it's not a structure but some kind of abstracted essence of connection and commitment, will, it is based on another's individuality and loving them as they are rather than something to mold and conform. You can't crush someone if you really love them; you want to preserve and protect them.

 

[rav3n]

The first half was okay. I loved the flowers! The last half was awful.

It doesn't matter to me if movies stick to the premises of books. As long as the stories are cogent and entertaining, it's all good.