Pan, pirate, poppycock!
The best film of Disney's ongoing, increasingly worn-out cycle of live-action (and/or photorealistic CGI that the studio stubbornly declares to be "live-action" as a marketing hook) remakes of its classic animated features is 2016's Pete's Dragon, which isn't even a remake of an animated feature anyways, and that probably helped. It also helped that Pete's Dragon was the only one of these films to be directed by an actual filmmaker whose career was in an exciting place at the time he got the job: it was the sophomore feature by David Lowery, whose 2013 debut Ain't Them Bodies Saints seemed to promise a very strong new voice in American indie cinema. Impressively, despite being a work-for-hire job on behalf of a corporation with a uniquely strong track record for smothering the artistic potential out of every new filmmaker it got its claws on, Pete's Dragon even turned out to be an admirable continuation of the aesthetic ideas Lowery had begun developing in his first feature. It has all the feeling of a personal statement, a remarkable miracle given what it is and where it came from.
This was pretty much the whole of the case for why it made any sense at all to be excited for Peter Pan & Wendy, Lowery's second Disney feature. But even that was a thin reed to hold onto, as far as I'm concerned: Lowery's career has been, for me, an uninterrupted downward slide in quality, and there seemed to be very little reason to expect that this, his sixth feature, was going to be in a position to reverse that slide. Especially since Peter Pan & Wendy is a streaming exclusive for the corporation's ever-more-tattered-looking Disney+, putting it in the uniquely grim company of the 2019 Lady and the Tramp and the 2022 Pinocchio. And if that's the comparison we're making, this is yet another miracle, for it's quite a bit better than either one of those. It is, to be sure, still bad, for a whole host of reasons. But the difference between "well that sucked" and "that movie made me feel like fire ants had been implanted beneath my skin" is a real difference.
The screenplay by Lowery & Toby Halbrooks (the latter's only other feature screenwriting credit is, how 'bout that, Pete's Dragon) is formally credited as an adaptation of the 1953 Disney film Peter Pan and the 1911 novel Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie - a distinction that I'm sure the Disney lawyers were very scrupulous about, given that Peter and Wendy, unlike Barrie's better-known play Peter Pan; or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, is no longer covered by copyright in the United States - but there's very little specific to the original Disney film present here. Some costuming choices, a cameo of the song "You Can Fly!" in Daniel Hart's score, a few visual jokes, and the lettering used for the film's title; otherwise, it's pretty much just a new gloss on the Barrie original. And even that's not really anything special, at this point: after a long, desolate gulf of Peter Pan movies in the 110 years between the play's 1904 premiere and 2014 (a grand total of two live-action features: a silent Peter Pan in 1924, and an expensive UK/USA co-production in 2003; if you want to also count Steven Spielberg's Hook, I won't try to stop you), the last decade has suddenly witnessed a miniature boom of revisionist Peter Pans: Joe Wright's expensive flop Pan in 2015, and then a pair of high-concept indies that premiered within days of each other at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival: Come Away and Wendy, which like so many films from 2020 don't actually exist. So there both is and isn't room for Peter Pan & Wendy to be a fresh new take on the old story, though its ideas of how to freshen things up are awfully stodgy and, frankly, pretty dumb. One such gesture is to make some of the Lost Boys girls, a tweak so small and insubstantial that the film itself seems to realise that we won't notice it has done so if it doesn't cram in a stunningly bad exchange of dialogue in which Wendy (Ever Anderson, who looks distractingly like her mother, Milla Jovovich) says "You're not a boy", and the female Lost Boy says "yeah, and what of it?" and Wendy says "nothing, I guess", and what's horrifying is that I'm not actually certain that was a paraphrase and not just a direct quote. Also, the film has some vague instinct that it wants to be an edgy girl power version of the story, but it absolutely does not know how to go about such a thing:
"In this version, it's not even about Peter Pan. It's about Wendy, and how she learns to be her own self-confident person as a young adult."
Yeah, that has been what every prior version of Peter Pan was about also.
"In this version, Peter Pan isn't an admirable hero, he's kind of an arrogant prick whom the other characters need to grow beyond."
Yep, sounds like Peter Pan in every telling of the story going back to the Edwardian period.
The main Hip, Fresh, and Subversive thing that Peter Pan & Wendy actually seems to add to the familiar story is to decide, for God knows what reason, to grind all of the fantastical elements out as much as can possibly be done for a story about using magical dust to fly. Neverland itself is played by the coast of British Columbia, looking very much like an attractive but not terribly distinctive chunk of Canadian landscape, lots of green grass interrupted sometimes by rocky bluffs. We see mermaids for the absolute shortest possible amount of time you could keep them onscreen and still be able to later say with a straight face "there were mermaids in that movie". Even the monstrous crocodile only shows up once in the whole film, demonstrating absolutely no personality nor any sense that it's anything but a large, starving animal. And even that one appearance is robbed of all its charm and fun by the fact that the CGI used to create the crocodile is fucking horrible - the worst effect of all in a movie that has some woefully bad effects work (even the green-screening is bad), looking like a grainy turd with teeth - and by the fact that most of its appearance involves a "comic" chase scene with the pirates running away while Verdi's "Anvil Chorus" from Il trovatore plays, like some sort of ghastly, high-minded, de-sexed Benny Hill skit.
The version of the story that emerges from this is extremely scaled-back and dour, focusing above all else on the emotional backstory between eternal tween Peter Pan (Alexander Molony) and irritable one-handed pirate Captain James Hook (Jude Law). "The emotional backstory?" you are perhaps wondering with raised eyebrow. "Like, the bit where Hook is pissy because Peter cut his hand off and fed it to a crocodile?" No, the brand new emotional backstory, which comes to dominate the film's last third. I've never spent a single minute of my life wondering about what might have gone on between Peter and Hook in the ageless years before the fateful day that Wendy and her brothers came to visit, but I'm pretty sure that what Lowery & Halbrooks came up with is the single most obvious possible choice for such a backstory. Which isn't to say it doesn't work, just that the turn Peter Pan & Wendy makes towards emotional complexity feels very predigested. It's very much "the thing David Lowery does", not just as a narrative, but stylistically and tonally: it's full of washed-out golden hour shots (including one image at an important moment in the climax that's basically nothing but a massive lens flare) and a general hushed and solemn mood. Which isn't bad in and of itself, though it's weird for Peter Pan and specifically weird for this particular incarnation of Peter Pan, which is trying extremely hard to counterweight all of that Lowery-ness with lots of bright, peppy, kid-friendly fun. I have mentioned the Anvil Chorus bit. I could also add that Wendy's arc seems to substantially consist of learning how to deliver action movie one-liners in a sarcastic snarl. Also, in general, Hart's score is screaming at us that we're having a marvelous time watching the lively swashbuckling adventure, and it does this even in scenes that are covered in smoggy blue murk. Which isn't a lot of scenes, though Peter Pan & Wendy is certainly more guilty of under-lighting than over-lighting, and Lowery and cinematographer Bojan Bazelli pretty much just give up entirely whenever there's a night scene, as there is in, for example, the entirety of the first act.
The net result of all of this is a confusing mish-mash, in which the heavy tone feels trivialised by the flippant touches, the sense of fun gets buried by the crushing solemnity and fussy visual beauty, and all in all, any sense of grandeur and awe is banished by the sheer "direct to streaming" of it. There is only one glimmer of life in any of this, and it's from the most expected source: Law's take on Captain Hook, which isn't really all the same as the pathetic campy moron that Hans Conreid and the animators came up with in the 1953 Peter Pan. There's still a camp element, but it's mixed in with a lot of other things: a childish petulance as he swings from woundedness to anger, a more tightly-controlled physical presence. He's an actual character, scary and sad and dangerous, a complicated and unpredictable force of life-giving energy in a movie without any other interesting performances or characters: the children are particularly bad (though Ever isn't beyond hope, I think - Molony, for his part, is genuinely film-breaking), but it's remarkable how many of the adults - Jim Gaffigan as Hook's right-hand man Smee, Molly Parker and Alan Tudyk as the children's parents - seem perfectly happy to play down to the trite lines and boilerplate material they've been given. Law's material is no less trite, but he's treating it with the gravity that British actors tend to do even with crummy parts (not for nothing, he's the only English grown-up in this adaption of such quintessential English material), treating the corny backstory as a character note to thread backwards and forwards in his performance, letting it result in a villain who's still big and hammy, but with lots of complex notes. "Overqualified actor does great work in playing an iconic villain" is a common recurring feature of these Disney live-action trash piles, stretching all the way back to Glenn Close's miraculous turn in the grim 101 Dalmatians in 1996; Law is keeping up a noble tradition in that sense, and while I think it's a little sad for him that he put so much effort into such a limp project, I would certainly not like to know what Peter Pan & Wendy would be like without him.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
This was pretty much the whole of the case for why it made any sense at all to be excited for Peter Pan & Wendy, Lowery's second Disney feature. But even that was a thin reed to hold onto, as far as I'm concerned: Lowery's career has been, for me, an uninterrupted downward slide in quality, and there seemed to be very little reason to expect that this, his sixth feature, was going to be in a position to reverse that slide. Especially since Peter Pan & Wendy is a streaming exclusive for the corporation's ever-more-tattered-looking Disney+, putting it in the uniquely grim company of the 2019 Lady and the Tramp and the 2022 Pinocchio. And if that's the comparison we're making, this is yet another miracle, for it's quite a bit better than either one of those. It is, to be sure, still bad, for a whole host of reasons. But the difference between "well that sucked" and "that movie made me feel like fire ants had been implanted beneath my skin" is a real difference.
The screenplay by Lowery & Toby Halbrooks (the latter's only other feature screenwriting credit is, how 'bout that, Pete's Dragon) is formally credited as an adaptation of the 1953 Disney film Peter Pan and the 1911 novel Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie - a distinction that I'm sure the Disney lawyers were very scrupulous about, given that Peter and Wendy, unlike Barrie's better-known play Peter Pan; or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, is no longer covered by copyright in the United States - but there's very little specific to the original Disney film present here. Some costuming choices, a cameo of the song "You Can Fly!" in Daniel Hart's score, a few visual jokes, and the lettering used for the film's title; otherwise, it's pretty much just a new gloss on the Barrie original. And even that's not really anything special, at this point: after a long, desolate gulf of Peter Pan movies in the 110 years between the play's 1904 premiere and 2014 (a grand total of two live-action features: a silent Peter Pan in 1924, and an expensive UK/USA co-production in 2003; if you want to also count Steven Spielberg's Hook, I won't try to stop you), the last decade has suddenly witnessed a miniature boom of revisionist Peter Pans: Joe Wright's expensive flop Pan in 2015, and then a pair of high-concept indies that premiered within days of each other at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival: Come Away and Wendy, which like so many films from 2020 don't actually exist. So there both is and isn't room for Peter Pan & Wendy to be a fresh new take on the old story, though its ideas of how to freshen things up are awfully stodgy and, frankly, pretty dumb. One such gesture is to make some of the Lost Boys girls, a tweak so small and insubstantial that the film itself seems to realise that we won't notice it has done so if it doesn't cram in a stunningly bad exchange of dialogue in which Wendy (Ever Anderson, who looks distractingly like her mother, Milla Jovovich) says "You're not a boy", and the female Lost Boy says "yeah, and what of it?" and Wendy says "nothing, I guess", and what's horrifying is that I'm not actually certain that was a paraphrase and not just a direct quote. Also, the film has some vague instinct that it wants to be an edgy girl power version of the story, but it absolutely does not know how to go about such a thing:
"In this version, it's not even about Peter Pan. It's about Wendy, and how she learns to be her own self-confident person as a young adult."
Yeah, that has been what every prior version of Peter Pan was about also.
"In this version, Peter Pan isn't an admirable hero, he's kind of an arrogant prick whom the other characters need to grow beyond."
Yep, sounds like Peter Pan in every telling of the story going back to the Edwardian period.
The main Hip, Fresh, and Subversive thing that Peter Pan & Wendy actually seems to add to the familiar story is to decide, for God knows what reason, to grind all of the fantastical elements out as much as can possibly be done for a story about using magical dust to fly. Neverland itself is played by the coast of British Columbia, looking very much like an attractive but not terribly distinctive chunk of Canadian landscape, lots of green grass interrupted sometimes by rocky bluffs. We see mermaids for the absolute shortest possible amount of time you could keep them onscreen and still be able to later say with a straight face "there were mermaids in that movie". Even the monstrous crocodile only shows up once in the whole film, demonstrating absolutely no personality nor any sense that it's anything but a large, starving animal. And even that one appearance is robbed of all its charm and fun by the fact that the CGI used to create the crocodile is fucking horrible - the worst effect of all in a movie that has some woefully bad effects work (even the green-screening is bad), looking like a grainy turd with teeth - and by the fact that most of its appearance involves a "comic" chase scene with the pirates running away while Verdi's "Anvil Chorus" from Il trovatore plays, like some sort of ghastly, high-minded, de-sexed Benny Hill skit.
The version of the story that emerges from this is extremely scaled-back and dour, focusing above all else on the emotional backstory between eternal tween Peter Pan (Alexander Molony) and irritable one-handed pirate Captain James Hook (Jude Law). "The emotional backstory?" you are perhaps wondering with raised eyebrow. "Like, the bit where Hook is pissy because Peter cut his hand off and fed it to a crocodile?" No, the brand new emotional backstory, which comes to dominate the film's last third. I've never spent a single minute of my life wondering about what might have gone on between Peter and Hook in the ageless years before the fateful day that Wendy and her brothers came to visit, but I'm pretty sure that what Lowery & Halbrooks came up with is the single most obvious possible choice for such a backstory. Which isn't to say it doesn't work, just that the turn Peter Pan & Wendy makes towards emotional complexity feels very predigested. It's very much "the thing David Lowery does", not just as a narrative, but stylistically and tonally: it's full of washed-out golden hour shots (including one image at an important moment in the climax that's basically nothing but a massive lens flare) and a general hushed and solemn mood. Which isn't bad in and of itself, though it's weird for Peter Pan and specifically weird for this particular incarnation of Peter Pan, which is trying extremely hard to counterweight all of that Lowery-ness with lots of bright, peppy, kid-friendly fun. I have mentioned the Anvil Chorus bit. I could also add that Wendy's arc seems to substantially consist of learning how to deliver action movie one-liners in a sarcastic snarl. Also, in general, Hart's score is screaming at us that we're having a marvelous time watching the lively swashbuckling adventure, and it does this even in scenes that are covered in smoggy blue murk. Which isn't a lot of scenes, though Peter Pan & Wendy is certainly more guilty of under-lighting than over-lighting, and Lowery and cinematographer Bojan Bazelli pretty much just give up entirely whenever there's a night scene, as there is in, for example, the entirety of the first act.
The net result of all of this is a confusing mish-mash, in which the heavy tone feels trivialised by the flippant touches, the sense of fun gets buried by the crushing solemnity and fussy visual beauty, and all in all, any sense of grandeur and awe is banished by the sheer "direct to streaming" of it. There is only one glimmer of life in any of this, and it's from the most expected source: Law's take on Captain Hook, which isn't really all the same as the pathetic campy moron that Hans Conreid and the animators came up with in the 1953 Peter Pan. There's still a camp element, but it's mixed in with a lot of other things: a childish petulance as he swings from woundedness to anger, a more tightly-controlled physical presence. He's an actual character, scary and sad and dangerous, a complicated and unpredictable force of life-giving energy in a movie without any other interesting performances or characters: the children are particularly bad (though Ever isn't beyond hope, I think - Molony, for his part, is genuinely film-breaking), but it's remarkable how many of the adults - Jim Gaffigan as Hook's right-hand man Smee, Molly Parker and Alan Tudyk as the children's parents - seem perfectly happy to play down to the trite lines and boilerplate material they've been given. Law's material is no less trite, but he's treating it with the gravity that British actors tend to do even with crummy parts (not for nothing, he's the only English grown-up in this adaption of such quintessential English material), treating the corny backstory as a character note to thread backwards and forwards in his performance, letting it result in a villain who's still big and hammy, but with lots of complex notes. "Overqualified actor does great work in playing an iconic villain" is a common recurring feature of these Disney live-action trash piles, stretching all the way back to Glenn Close's miraculous turn in the grim 101 Dalmatians in 1996; Law is keeping up a noble tradition in that sense, and while I think it's a little sad for him that he put so much effort into such a limp project, I would certainly not like to know what Peter Pan & Wendy would be like without him.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
