Quantum physics crumples in Ava DuVernay’s rainbow bright adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, allowing preteen science geek Meg (Storm Reid), her crush (Calvin) and her five-year-old genius brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe) to blerp from earth to the screensaver fantasy-lands at the end of the galaxy in search of her missing father (Chris Pine). Everything else is shiny and smooth, including the ancient faces of the three witch-angels who guide the kiddies’ adventure. Mrs Whatsit, the youngest of the trio at two-billion-years-plus, has gotten made-over since L’Engle catalogued her thin gray bun and “mouth puckered like an autumn apple”. Now she looks like Reese Witherspoon – wait, she is Reese Witherspoon – though it can he hard to tell under her hip-length red locks and pleated ballgown fashioned from pilfered sheets.

That Witherspoon looks like a toga party keg-stand champion befits DuVernay’s modern vision of a paperback classic bedazzled to within an inch of its life. (Maybe even closer to death than that – I wouldn’t want to be within a mile of Oprah Winfrey when she realizes her sequined eyebrows just look super silly.) The costumes are at once cluttered and vacuous. The design decree is: “More!” Mrs Whatsit, Winfrey’s Mrs Which and Mindy Kaling’s Mrs Who are plated in extravagant ruffles and braids, but their outfits are such a heedless hot-glue assault, they don’t say a thing about who these characters individually are. They are glitter dolls flung into a technicolor void.

Forget the tykes. Winfrey alights in Meg and Charles Wallace’s backyard as though astrologically assured that she’s the star of the film. Twice the size of everyone else and with her hair curled into an interplanetary fleur de lis, she looms and bobs and radiates love upon all the lesser beings onscreen and in seats. In one scene, a flying Charles Wallace stretches out a small hand to stroke Winfrey’s cheek. It feels like the most sincere shot in the movie.

DuVernay’s updated L’Engle is totally for kids. Good. It’s high time adults between 18 and seven billion loosen their death grip on action figures and hand children’s entertainment back to children. However, this Wrinkle in Time doesn’t seem made for the kind of actual, human children who dogeared the five-paperback series with playground-grimy nails muttering the words “tesseract” and “liverwurst” to themselves like mysterious incantations. The film is tentative and over-protective, as though it’s terrified that a story empowering kids to help good battle evil could give someone a nightmare. It reduces the whole universe to one girl’s self-esteem.

As a former girl myself, I remember carrying insecurities that felt bigger than all the planets combined. There’s truth in confronting the weak parts of yourself that kids early on learn to hide away, and a great shot of young Reid with her charming knock-kneed sprint racing to scream her own worth into the great unknown. L’Engle trusted that kids were even tougher than that. She wrote with brilliant dispassion. She wanted young readers to value individualism, but she wasn’t going to placate tykes into swallowing her ideas like a game of here-comes-the-airplane. Her themes weren’t coated in a spoonful of sugar – for chrissakes, she fed characters liverwurst.

Storm Reid, Deric McCabe and Reese Witherspoon. Photograph: Atsushi Nishijima/AP

There’s no nose-wrinkling meat-pastes here. The film has the feel of an iPad video pawned off on a toddler so Dad can make comforting mac and cheese – here’s a bite-sized lesson about loving yourself and a jumble of pretty colors. Fair enough. A Wrinkle in Time would look better on a small screen. Most of the shots are close-ups of the characters’ faces framed so large you can’t see the terrible CG backdrops behind them, and edited together without intent. Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell’s script is strung together word-clumps from characters standing around reciting stiff, informational speeches as though they beamed in from a video game cutscene. As they chant earnest thoughts about embracing your faults, the camera continually cuts from one warm smile to another like an anxious puppy desperate for reassurance. The entire film maintains that nervous pace. There’s no room to breathe or think or find your own way into an emotional moment. By the end, I was so smothered in comfort my teeth were grinding.

A Wrinkle in Time feels like a product molded by a megacorporation too tense to hand over the factory controls. You can only see DuVernay carving her initials into the corners of the film, adding deeper layers to Meg’s insecurity about her curly natural hair, trumpeting her delight in presenting a young, black, female heroine whose greatest strength is parabolas. What DuVernay lacks in a grand imagination of the universe – Wrinkle seems to be scotch-taped from scraps of Alice in Wonderland’s sentient flower-patch, including a costume change where Witherspoon transforms into a sexy leaf of kale, and the cruel planet Camazotz merely looks like a Target commercial in hell – she compensates for with her clear vision of our own planet. As in the books, Mrs Who prefers to speak only in famous quotations, but now her nods to the European canon of Euripides, Dante and Shakespeare has been enlivened with lines from Outkast and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

“Tomorrow there’ll be more of us,” chimps Kaling, mercifully cutting the Hamilton lyrics short before the moment gets more awkward. In a film flattened under the weight of too much more, the line at first sounds like a threat. But there should be more ambitious sci-fi for kids, with casts, creatives and crew members so diverse that eventually audiences won’t even think to comment on them. Hopefully, we’ll have more, and better, empowering blockbusters for kindergartners to paw on their flatscreens. DuVernay’s truest vision is that this world – not just our paths to faraway planets – has to bend.