Still from “A Wrinkle in Time”

Filmed on a budget of $103 million, A Wrinkle in Time is expected to break even at best. Directed by Ava DuVernay and based on Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 novel of the same name, the film made only $33 million on its opening weekend. Its shockingly poor reviews (39% on Rotten Tomatoes) have people questioning why the Disney movie fell well below expectations. The short answer: there is no religion. The 2018 movie is not faithful to the book; L’Engle’s deeply religious elements are missing and nothing was added to fill that void.

L’Engle, who died in 2007, was an Episcopalian who believed in universal reconciliation, the idea that after death all humans will be reconciled with God and find salvation. Those who weren’t already alienated by this controversial belief were often put off by the book’s liberal political messages. Many Christian bookstores refused to carry her work. On the other side, secular critics attacked her books for being too religious.

Today, in a country where religion is not so much declining, as it is being increasingly consigned to private life, releasing a Hollywood movie for children with religious undertones was sure to invite a public debate. While the religious themes may go unnoticed by the target audience, their parents do much of the interpreting for them and are not as keen on letting things slide. Even the massively successful Harry Potter franchise, while an exception to the rule, remains a target for religious parents and groups. So, instead, we get this version of A Wrinkle in Time where the lack of religion makes for a lackluster coming-of-age story that many moviegoers want to like, but can’t.

The only redeeming quality about the movie is the diversity of the cast. Meg Murry (Storm Reid) is a bi-racial, natural haired, and self-doubting teenage girl who goes on a mission across the universe to find her father (Chris Pine), a time traveling astrophysicist who has been missing for four years. Her popular classmate Calvin O’Keefe (Levi Miller) accompanies her, along with her adopted prodigy brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe) – a Filipino-American who provides the movie with some much-needed comic relief. The trio is led by three magical beings in human form who can travel across space and time at will, Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey), Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), and Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling).

The story begins when the Mrs. Ws hear a call in the universe and inform Meg and Charles Wallace that their father is still alive. They confirm Mr. Murry’s scientific theory of the tesseract, a fifth dimensional wormhole that brings two points in time and space closer together. Meg, Charles Wallace, Calvin, and the Mrs. Ws use it to wrinkle time and travel to the serene planet of Uriel (an unacknowledged reference to archangel Uriel). Here, they see a black cloud in the sky and learn that it is a dark manifestation of IT, a controlling force that has taken over planet Camazotz (named after a Mayan bat god) and is responsible for all the evil in the universe.

After visiting the Happy Medium, who uses his crystal ball to find that Mr. Murry is trapped on Camazotz, the six tesser there. Unable to withstand the planet’s darkness, the Mrs. Ws leave the children with advice: things are not as they seem and they should never separate. The trio navigates through a tornado and an eerily harmonized suburban neighborhood where children bounce balls in perfect unison, before ending up on a crowded beach where a man with red eyes hypnotizes Charles Wallace with the power of IT. Charles Wallace, now directly controlled by IT, reunites the group with Mr. Murry and drags them closer to IT. Mr. Murry and Calvin tesser back to Earth while Meg courageously stays to free her brother by confessing her familial love for him, weakening IT. The two then tesser back to Earth, say their goodbyes to the Mrs. Ws, and the Murry family is finally reunited.

Still from “A Wrinkle in Time”

The common theme of good versus evil (represented by light and darkness) is reminiscent of the prologue to the Gospel of John and is directly quoted in the book. When the Mrs. Ws mention several important people in Earth’s history have helped fight the darkness, Mrs. Who gives them a hint: “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” (John 1:5; L’Engle, p.100) Charles Wallace correctly answers “Jesus!” and learns that Shakespeare, Einstein, Gandhi, and Buddha were all bearers of light too. The passage implies Jesus is no more important than the other figures mentioned, an assertion that led a school district in Alabama to ban the book in 1990.

For L’Engle, Christianity embraced a paradox – an omnipotent unknowable God who gave humans a divine yet mortal and knowable human being in Jesus Christ who could deliver his message. In L’Engle’s book, the Mrs. Ws are God’s messengers. Their powers are supernatural, but take human forms on earth in order to give the children wisdom and faith. While the Mrs. Ws are main characters both in the book and the movie, our understanding of their characters are much more limited in the latter. In the movie, they are forces of light – that is the full extent of their backstory. In the book, though, each are billions-years-old former stars who sacrificed themselves by amplifying their light to become supernovas who destroyed parts of IT. They act as guardian angels of the universe, using their power to guide the children. Well-versed in Biblical text, they translate a song sung (in a foreign language) by the aliens of Uriel inspired by the Book of Daniel and the Book of Isaiah. Without this explanation, we can’t help but wonder why the Mrs. Ws exist in the first place and what their connection is to the universe.

The movie also leaves behind the biblical battle between light and dark at the core of the book. Instead, we are left with a superficial struggle between good and evil for the sake of plot. Though the origins of IT are never revealed in the book, IT is described as a bodiless telepathic gigantic brain whose goal is to eliminate war, unhappiness, and inefficiency. Accurately depicted in the film as enforcing conformity and robotic synchronism throughout Camazotz, IT lacks the physical form of the brain and therefore the type of consciousness that can explain how evil conceptualizes ITself. Instead, IT has no motive and simply symbolizes greed, anger, and selfishness with no profound or religious justification for the presence of evil.

Still from “A Wrinkle in Time”

However, the movie effectually converts one of the central religious themes of the book into a secular one: the power of love. In the context of the book, we are led to believe that Meg’s love for Charles Wallace and the freedom it gave him from IT is symbolic of God’s love for humankind. In the face of hatred, doubt, and evil, God’s love is still powerful enough to be humans’ saving grace. We are even left with hope that love will one day free Camazotz from the clutches of IT too. It is L’Engle’s universal reconciliation at its finest. Meanwhile, the movie’s version of love, while still powerful, seems to be more limited in scope. It is brought down from the divine to the human level, limited to self-love, familial love, and our relationships with other people. Love can potentially save one person from evil, but is it strong enough to save a whole planet? Love wins, sometimes.

Nominated for a Golden Globe Award and two Academy Awards, Ava DuVernay is truly a brilliant film director known for her work on Selma (2014), which told the story of the 1965 voting rights marches from Selma to Montgomery led by Martin Luther King Jr., and the documentary 13^th (2016) about how the 13^th amendment freed slaves but prolonged slavery via mass incarceration. With A Wrinkle in Time, she became the first African-American woman to direct a live-action film on a budget exceeding $100 million.

In an interview with Vulture, DuVernay said she was not sure how A Wrinkle in Time would be received. At its core, it is the story of a young black girl who heroically saves her family and the world from darkness. Commenting on the protagonist being a black heroine, DuVernay says the symbolism of her character is deliberate, “It’s not shied away from. It is front and center.” Though she does not comment on why she removed much of the religious themes and allusions, it is likely that she did not want to overshadow the importance of racial diversity for her young audience. It is a profound moral objective she believed could be achieved without religion, and with those efforts, DuVernay does add meaning not originally not found in the book.

It is also possible that as a black woman in a field dominated by white men, DuVernay understood herself to be in an already precarious position. There is an enormous amount of pressure for her to do well, especially as her film was unavoidably compared to the hugely successful Black Panther (2018), a mainstream movie directed by African-American Ryan Coogler which was released just weeks earlier. Including religious elements may have opened her up to more criticism and the racial diversity in her cast would have been mentioned in the same sentence with an “overuse” of religion. In the end, there was not enough space for a double feature – blackness and religion are still too much for a 2018 Disney movie to contain.

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Fortune Onyiorah is a Master’s student at NYU’s Religious Studies Program.  She is currently writing a thesis on the subject of intersectionality in the Black diaspora.