A Wrinkle in Time/YMMV

• Alternate Character Interpretation: A commentator on Mari Ness' Madeleine L'Engle reread for Wrinkle argues that Meg's character shows a "far better portrayal of a profoundly gifted child than Charles Wallace was."
• Non Sequitur Scene: The stop on/in the two-dimensional planet.
• Covers Always Lie: The DVD cover features the three main characters on a winged horse above a medieval-looking castle, neither of which remotely resembles anything that appears in the film. They Just Didn't Care.
• First Installment Wins: Ever heard of A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, or Many Waters? None of them got Newbery medals.
  • A Swiftly Tilting Planet did win the American Book Award in 1980.
• Genius Bonus: Camazotz is also the name of a particularly terrifying Mayan bat god.
• Karma Houdini: IT gets away scot-free. Not so in the movie.
  • Then again, the TV movie has Meg free an entire planet from brain-washing by making one awkward, rambling speech. Talk about an Anticlimax.
  • You sure IT's still okay? The book never specifies what happened to IT.
  • Later books imply that IT and the other "forces of evil" out there have not escaped their karma per se; they will get what's coming to them as soon as one of the "good guys" gets around to gathering enough strength to fight them off. Which makes the entire climax of the book into something of a Hopeless Boss Fight.
  • It is intended to be rather real world, as if he was captured by a Earth nation run by a dictator, the battle between good and evil continues on after the story. In Real Life dictators sometimes get away and sometimes don't.
  • In general, the plot of escape from the evil land or rescue someone from the evil land leaves the evil land and its evil rulers intact.
  • The book used the phrase "IT's fatal mistake" to refer to the taunt that inspired Meg's winning strategy, and the text seemed to describe Meg and Charles Wallace being whisked out of there just ahead of an explosion. I don't think IT survived. No telling what that means for the people of Camazotz.
    • I always read "IT's fatal mistake" as a metaphor, indicating that IT clued Meg into the tactic. The text seemed to vividly indicate anger and the effects as Meg and Charles were tessered out through the Black Thing.
• They Just Didn't Care: The Movie.

Newsweek interviewer: So you've seen the movie?
Madeleine L'Engle: I've glimpsed it.
Interviewer: And did it meet expectations?
L'Engle: Oh, yes. I expected it to be bad, and it is.

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