Disney's 'A Wrinkle in Time': a Prospective

Editor’s Note: Another good friend, Dick Devine, shares his first article written for Men of the West. We have known him for many years, and have appreciated his dedication to saving the West. 
 
It’s been many years since I’ve read Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time series, but it isn’t hard to see why Hollywood finds it to be so compelling; after all, it features a strong female lead and is replete with visuals that would come to life beautifully on the big screen–I mean, between Interstellar and Doctor Strange, Hollywood has pretty much got this tesseracting business down to a science. Visually, it’s gonna look great…
… But there’s a catch: A Wrinkle in Time is anti-communist Christian science fiction, and that means it will be treated with as much care as a fragile package in the hands of the US Postal Service.
The theological messaging and anti-communist themes that underpin A Wrinkle in Time basically fly in the face of everything Hollywood stands for.  Wherein diversity is a brightly colored rainbow now, eventually it dulls into a sepia toned monochromatic slurry in which there is no cultural divide, nor are there any more differences to celebrate.  At the end of the day, the regressive left’s vision of the future looks a hell of a lot like Camazotz.
So it makes good sense that, while A Wrinkle in Time has never been on the same level as Lord of the Rings or Chronicles of Narnia, it is, to be sure, a Christian stronghold to be cast down by godless Hollywood.  The fact that the protagonist is a strong, bright young girl makes it malleable enough to fit into the left’s narrative.
Just so we’re clear, the progressive is aptly named.  Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time will not be about asking you to divorce faith from the source material–though that will be done simply out of apparent negligence.  You can’t paint Christianity in any kind of light at all, neither good nor bad, so it will not even be mentioned.  In one interview, Mindy Kaling, who will play Mrs. Who, states that she “Even quotes Jay Z in the film.”  A far cry from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.
I will admit that from the trailer, the film looks to be visually stunning, compelling, exciting, and frankly has every element to make this a successful film, but these are all cheap bribery for the message they want you to accept: That “you don’t need God, we didn’t need God to make this film, and Madeline L’Engle didn’t need God to tell her story.” While the writers and director don’t need to explicitly tell you that they’ve expelled faith from the material, they did have to explicitly gloss over it in studying the source.  It’s simply not something you can overlook if you read the books.
Now, obviously I haven’t seen the film. It’s not due out until Spring of 2018. However, the theology is so inescapable that it should be present somewhere in interviews–it’s not, and in its stead is an ongoing commentary on how director Ava DuVernay is worried that people won’t like the film because everybody that goes to see movies are racist misogynistic xenophobic white cis males. Not in those exact words, but everything comes back to self-validation for her choice to have a diverse cast, so there’s a clear motive.
We can’t know for sure until the movie is out, but what we can be sure of is that Ava DuVernay, with her degrees from UCLA in English and African-American studies will rightly divide L’Engle’s Christian overtones and will definitely not make it all about herself.