Mike Huckabee says Disney's big-budget adaptation of the children's sci-fi classic "A Wrinkle in Time" alienates fans of the book by replacing references to God with New Age "gobbledygook."
"Author Madeline L'Engle was a deeply spiritual person who made Christianity a central theme of her book, filling it with references to the Bible, God and Jesus and quotes from Scripture," the former Arkansas governor and two-time presidential candidate, writes on his blog MikeHuckabee.com.
"The new movie jettisons almost all of that, replacing it with references to liberal social justice heroes such as Nelson Mandela and the kind of self-centered New Age beliefs currently popular in Hollywood."
"It's not surprising that it stars Oprah Winfrey, since replacing God with 'The Universe' and moral leaders with gobbledygook about 'forces of light,' and promoting self-empowerment instead of spiritual growth, made some critics feel as if they were sitting through a two-hour episode of Oprah's talk show with CGI effects."
Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, says the movie's underwhelming box-office take suggests that Hollywood studio heads consider returning to "the old, profitable days when studio heads looked at Middle American Christians as their target audience instead of their target."
"Failing that, they could try praying for these audience-insulting movies to make more money. But since they've replaced God with self-worship, I'm not sure that praying to themselves is going to do much good."
The PG-rated flick, made by the Walt Disney Studios for a reported budget of $103 million, follows the adventures of a young girl named Meg Murry who travels into space with her brother Charles and a friend Calvin in a hunt for her missing scientist dad.
"A Wrinkle in Time" scored an abysmal 42 percent on the movie-review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, which said while it is "visually gorgeous, big-hearted, and occasionally quite moving; unfortunately, it's also wildly ambitious to a fault, and often less than the sum of its classic parts."
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