Today, I was forced to watch the 109 minute-long bonanza of terrible acting, preteen romance, and overdone special effects called “A Wrinkle in Time.” As I was reading other reviews, (to see if I was the only one who hated it) I came across this quote from Brittany N. Williams: “‘A Wrinkle in Time’ is a meandering, disjointed, nonsensical slog through 109 minutes of 90s level CGI, heavy-handed dialogue, stilted acting, and shots up actors’ nostrils.” I couldn’t sum up the movie better.

“A Wrinkle in Time” is loosely based on the book of the same name. I say loosely because for some reason the movie in no way captured the essence, theme, or story that the book had. It followed the story of a girl named Meg (Storm Reid) trying to find her genius father in the universe. She winds up finding a lot about herself all whilst wallowing in self-hatred and staring at her new friend Calvin (Levi Miller) with puppy-dog eyes.

Honestly, I really wanted to like this movie. I was so excited to see a sci-fi movie directed by an African-American woman, led by a cast of strong women, that also told the story of a mixed-race family. I was all for watching a movie about girl power, but the whole girl-power thing definitely fell short.

The acting and dialogue were horrible. Everyone’s speaking voice sounded like a fourth grader rehearsing a skit to perform for their parents. The dialogue was unnatural, robotic, and sounded like the actors were trying too hard. I expected so much more from all of the actresses (Oprah Winfrey, Mindy Kaling, and Reese Witherspoon!) but every time they spoke I wound up smirking and shaking my head.

The most dreadful part of the movie were the special effects. The book provides so much opportunity for the special effects team. They had a chance to animate a 2D planet, which they threw away. Instead, they used the special effects to create talking flowers, random ribbons of light in the sky, and glitter. Everywhere. It didn’t make sense to me how they just decided to run wild with the special effects, tossing it around like confetti. The colors throughout the movie were so bright and tacky it seemed as though the editors turned the saturation all the way up.

The make-up was quite similar to the effects. Every character looked like a hot mess. There were way too many costume changes, put in the film for no reason other than the purpose of impressing the audience with the actresses’ quick-change skills.

The music didn’t fit in with any of the scenes whatsoever. It seemed like the music director put a Spotify pop playlist on shuffle, and inserted songs whenever the movie started to get boring.

In the end, “A Wrinkle in Time” was one wild ride. Sure, it may have been a cute and inspirational family movie, but technically, it dug itself into a ditch.