Thirteen-year-old Meg Murry struggles after the disappearance of her father. But, with the help of her brother Charles Wallace, her friend Calvin, and three mysterious women, she’ll set off on a dangerous trip across the universe to find him.

The movie seems to fail at every single level with very few positive qualities. There isn’t a single believable performance throughout the entire film, with Deric McCabe as Charles Wallace Murry being the worst of all of them.

Now, it’s important to understand a film or actor’s context before being able to critique them properly, and Deric McCabe is a 9-year-old boy, so no one is expecting an amazing performance. The issue isn’t really with McCabe, so much as it is with director Ava DuVernay for giving him so much screen time.

Out of all the characters he seems to have more dialogue than any other, which is a painful mistake for this film to make, as so much of the film is watching the actor Deric McCabe try his absolute hardest to do what the director is telling him to do. The child actors for Calvin and Meg were both bad, but like McCabe, not much can be expected from them.

But the film doesn’t just have bad child actors, there are also terrible performances from mainstream actors like Oprah Winfrey as (Mrs. Which), Reese Witherspoon (Mrs. Whatsit), Mindy Kaling as (Mrs. Who), and Chris Pine (Dr. Alexander Murry). Some of these are very talented actors who are completely wasted with awkward unnatural dialogue. Especially Mindy Kaling, whose entire character amounts to quoting famous people from history without saying anything herself, and really has no right to be in the film at all.

Oprah’s character who was apparently filmed separately from the others, wasn’t given any markers for where to like. There’s a few scenes when Oprah is much bigger than the rest of the characters, and is speaking to them but looking in the wrong direction. That should be the job of the director to coordinate something so basic, but from what’s shown director Ava DuVernay can’t really be expected from much.

“A Wrinkle in Time” has some of the worst shot composition and framing of any film released this year. Almost every scene of the film’s first half really needed to step back at least a few feet, with the shots being right up in the actor’s face, and almost always off center. It’s not hard to do a simple shot reverse shot for conversation, and while the film certainly does those, it does them about two inches from the actors face. If it isn’t a shot far too close in, its from a low angle pointing up, which always looks ugly. The poor look of the film isn’t just from bad directing, the special effects look completely unbelievable. There’s not a single realistic looking CGI set in the entire film, and many of the effects look like they’ve been ripped from the Playstation 3.

The music, which usually isn’t an aspect needed to be discussed of a film unless it’s very bad or very good, but in this it just doesn’t fit. There’s random pop songs placed in scenes that absolutely don’t need them and it can be very jarring at times.

The plot makes no cohesive sense, there’s less a cause effect relation to plot progression, instead things just happen without explanation. Everything they do just happens for no reason and then that repeats until the film ends. “A Wrinkle in Time” has one of the worst villian confrontations in recent cinema. Not only does it not make any sense, it’s extremely lazy and cliche. It’s just horribly done and again, happens for no reason.

There’s very little to like about “A Wrinkle in Time.” Some very young children might enjoy the bright colors and message of “learning to love yourself,” but for anyone else it’s just a boring waste of time.

“A Wrinkle in Time” has a runtime of one hour forty-nine minutes, and is rated PG for thematic elements and some peril.