Through the tesseract: all the updates, trailers, and commentary for Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time

Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 children’s novel A Wrinkle in Time is a weird book — and that’s gloriously deliberate. It’s about a family where weirdness is the norm, the natural offshoot of scientific brilliance and wild creativity. But it’s also about how one member of that family struggles with her own awkwardness, unlikability, and temper, and how those faults become assets in a supernatural fight to save her family from a vast interplanetary evil.

The new Disney film adaptation A Wrinkle in Time, directed by Ava DuVernay (an Oscar nominee for the 2015 historical feature Selma and the 2017 documentary 13th), pays a lot of lip service to that awkwardness but never convincingly captures it. L’Engle’s brand of weirdness can be ugly and unsettling, as her characters suffer physical abuse, fight their own uncontrollable rages, or just spout oddball jargon, oblivious to the ways they’re alienating or offending other people. The film is unmistakably the Disney version of the story, with anything potentially problematic or offensive sanded off and replaced with soft, pastel CGI. It’s a pretty take on the story, but it’s also a frustratingly safe and squishy one. It’s infinitely well-intentioned, full of warm self-affirmation and positivity, and absolutely nothing about it feels emotionally authentic enough to drive those messages home.

Disney has released a new trailer for its adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. This new trailer focuses on Meg Murry (played by 12 Years a Slave’s Storm Reid), a young girl who’s having trouble at school after her father mysteriously vanishes.

We’ve gotten glimpses of the gorgeous world in Ava DuVernay’s upcoming film in a pair of trailers, which laid the groundwork for the story: Meg’s father Alexander is a scientist who created the tesseract, which allows him to wrinkle time and travel across the universe.

During the 2017 American Music Awards, Disney debuted a new trailer for its adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, showing off a girl’s fantastic quest across the universe to safe her father.

The movie is based off of L’Engle’s 1963 novel. In it, we’re introduced to a young girl named Meg Murry (Storm Reid), who sets off with her younger brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), her friend Calvin O’Keefe (Levi Miller), and a trio of witches (Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Mindy Kaling) to search for her missing father, Alexander Murry (Chris Pine). Along the way, they visits several fantastic planets and discovers that the universe is under attack by a personification of evil, The Black Thing.

Disney has released the first trailer for Selma director Ava DuVernay’s upcoming science fiction film, A Wrinkle in Time at its D23 expo, showing off fantastic worlds and a diverse cast.

The trailer begins with Chris Pine’s character talking about travelling through space instantaneously, before ending up on another world. “Your father has accomplished extraordinary,” intones Oprah Winfrey’s Mrs. Witch. We then jump to his daughter, Meg Murry, who learns that her father is trapped by a dark force, and that she’s the only one who can stop it, all while we’re introduced to some utterly fantastic worlds and characters.

Selma director Ava DuVernay is set to break a major milestone: she will become the first woman of color to direct blockbuster movie with a budget of at least $100 million when she gets behind the camera for her upcoming film, A Wrinkle in Time.

DuVernay joined the production earlier this year, and in doing so, became one of a select group of filmmakers, ones who directed a major movie with a budget in excess of nine figures. According to the LA Times, she’s also part of two much smaller groups: women who have directed a film of that scale, as well as directors of color.