Anne and I saw this last night. Meh — I was not impressed. I’ll grant that it was pretty close to (a simplified version of) the book, and that I am not the target audience for the movie (or the book for that matter) by about four decades, and that I did enjoy large stretches of the movie, but there were other large stretches that just left me annoyed. On the whole, the movie left me with the same, sanctimonious “oh the wonder of it all!” vibe of a 90’s era computer advertisement, one targeting parents for their kids’ education, full of photogenic kids staring rapt at math-ey and science-ey graphics. I was seriously rolling my eyes by about 20 minutes into the movie…
The casting was also kind of spotty, and in a weird way: the more likely I knew an actor, the worse they were here. That is, the kids were all pretty good, but Oprah was awful — more of that sanctimony, maybe.
Anne kinda-sorta agreed with my “meh, kid stuff” assessment, but she didn’t think it was as bad as all that. She read the book as an adult though, reading it to/with Ben and Emmi and seeing it through their eyes, so she may have been more sympathetic.
Anyway, it was a night out, and I actually would recommend it for tweens, especially fans of the book.
