Writer/director James Gray, who tends to please critics more than crowds, takes a big left turn from his usual Earthbound family relationship dramas, leaping all the way to Neptune for Interplanetary family relationship drama. Whether he need have bothered is debatable as this unexceptional father/son conflict boils down to a hackneyed struggle between Dad (paranoid, God-like, Old Testament Tommy Lee Jones) and only son Brad Pitt, a wounded New Testament rebel out to save the world. Largely ditching the Bible for A WRINKLE IN TIME, Gray bumps the Madeleine L'Engle classic from YA to a grown-up Bizarro iteration*, with Jones off his nut on Station Neptune, flushing bolts of electricity and threatening the entire Solar System. Conceptually pretty weak, but as physical production the film’s a wow! Forgoing current CGI methods for old-school ‘practical’ special effects, the film is loaded with hushed beauty and a sense of daunting weight that so often goes missing in CGI. (Sense of scale not quite as successful as some of the planet & space-ship models look like Revell® 1:8 scale kits.) Yet a burial in ‘sea-space’ an instant classic, while a surprise attack from a primate stowaway (presumably an ‘escaped’ experiment) a desperation move to squeeze in an action sequence. Somehow, Pitt pulls it all off without embarrassment. The first Gray pic anyone might think of rewatching . . . but only for the F/X.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Alas, film attempts at A WRINKLE IN TIME have come up short. Instead, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001/’68, the obvious visual lodestar here. Note how its stubbornly slow pace and stillness, which ought to expose 1968 effects work, has the opposite effect of selling it. Gray unwilling or without the confidence to run out the clock. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/08/2001-space-odyssey-1968.html
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: No doubt, the producers hoped for more Academy Award action than the Best Sound Mixing nomination seen on our poster.
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