There are plenty of reasons to support this film. Director Ava DuVernay (13th, Selma) is undoubtedly one of the good guys. With its mixed-race central character, Meg (Storm Reid), this adaptation of a children’s book is a touchstone for a whole group of little girls who are not used to seeing representations of themselves on screen. And there’s an important message: accept and celebrate yourself – only then will you be able to defeat the luminous cosmic tentacles of evil.
Unfortunately, well-intentioned as it is, it’s hard to imagine that this sparkly mess of a movie will connect with cinema-goers far beyond its core audience of 10-to-14-year-old girls. The characters on this Oz-lite journey: Meg, her brother, her potential boyfriend and three glittery mystic beings (one of whom transmogrifies into a giant, sentient, flying cabbage leaf) never seem to emotionally connect. They are kept at arm’s length by the sickly What Dreams May Come-style fantasy FX and the mangled science.
And here’s the thing about sci-fi, even pastel-coloured, pre-teen sci-fi: there needs to be a delicate balance between the science and the fiction for it to click. Meg’s astrophysicist parents’ theory, that galactic travel is possible through a tesseract that vibrates on the same frequency as love, rather favours the fiction side of the equation. And who knew love was a vibration anyway? Actually, perhaps let’s not pursue that line of questioning.
