Peter Pan & Wendy review: A dark Disney update tells a new story

Most live-action Disney remakes really feel like perfunctory re-treads. The exceptions, that are few and much between, embody Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella, whose emphasis on kindness by adversity makes for an exquisite addition, and David Lowery’s Pete’s Dragon, which transforms the middling authentic right into a story that captures the surprise of childhood. Lowery additionally directed the straight-to-Disney-Plus function Peter Pan & Wendy, the live-action remake of Disney’s animated 1953 Peter Pan, which makes a strong argument for its existence by its aesthetic strategy.

When the primary trailer arrived, the film got here beneath hearth for its murky look, however that isn’t the entire story. This isn’t a movie about retaining a love for childhood whimsy: Lowery’s remake is about conflicted emotions on rising up, and what it takes to face this inevitable step. The movie’s alterations to the animated traditional are admirable (although sometimes wobbly), with a renewed concentrate on its theme of kids scuffling with leaving childhood behind. Lowery not solely returns to the unique supply materials, J.M. Barrie’s 1904 play, to borrow a handful of minor plot factors, however his thematic focus can be rather more according to Barrie’s than that of the Disney movie.

Merely copying and pasting the 1953 film’s wide-eyed strategy to surprise would imply re-treading the bottom Lowery already lined in his model of Pete’s Dragon, so as a substitute, he makes an attempt a more in-depth examination of childhood fairy tales, filtering them by a lens that’s each nostalgic for Disney’s authentic motion pictures and demanding of their wistful musings. On paper, the consequence is likely one of the extra significant departures from conference that Disney has seen lately. In execution, although, it falls ever so barely brief, although not for lack of originality.

The broad strokes of the story stay intact, from its opening scenes in Edwardian London, the place a pair of younger brothers, John (Joshua Pickering) and Michael Darling (Jacobi Jupe) interact in a make-believe pirate battle primarily based on fantasy tales of Captain Hook and Peter Pan. Solely this time, their older sister, Wendy Darling (Ever Anderson), eagerly joins the enjoyable as a substitute of performing family chores.

The movie’s first overt departure is its conception of Wendy as a extra boisterous, pushed, but pissed off character who harbors a need for independence. Right here, Wendy’s upcoming life change isn’t simply leaving the nursery, because it was within the earlier variations of the story. As an alternative, she’s set to depart house altogether, as her mother and father, George (Alan Tudyk) and Mary (Molly Parker), put together to ship her off to boarding college. Like her animated counterpart, she stays on the precipice of maturity, however in a way more direct and unnerving method for a younger tween, although the movie by no means touches on George and Mary’s causes for sending her away.

Within the opening moments that set up these beats, Lowery and cinematographer Bojan Bazelli lay the muse of how the film will depict this underlying battle by mild and visible texture. A prolonged, snaking one-shot introduces the Darling household, first by outdated images round their house, then by the kids’s energetic mischief. However the visible material stays boring and muted, whereas capturing the siblings by a large lens that appears to increase their atmosphere round them.

Peter Pan (Alexander Molony), Wendy (Ever Anderson), John Darling (Joshua Pickering), and Michael Darling (Jacobi Jupe) crouch at the top of a mossy, rocky ridge, looking over the edge in Peter Pan & Wendy

Photograph: Disney

This strategy ceases solely briefly, when Wendy and her mom have a heart-to-heart chat about her fears of rising up, throughout which their close-up portraits are warmly lit. The distinction is straightforward, in the way in which it presents familial love as a supply of life and reflection, a recurring visible motif. Within the meantime, Lowery’s in any other case gloomy palette for the Darlings’ family not solely fails to have in mind Wendy’s attachment to her house — the visible heat is remoted to particular private interactions, although she associates the home itself with childhood comforts.

The visible dimness additionally muddies subsequent whimsical occasions, just like the arrival of Tinker Bell (Yara Shahidi) and Peter Pan (Alexander Molony). The previous’s magical glow fails to counteract a lot of the dullness round her — the manufacturing design of the Darlings’ house is just too boring to be eye-catching, even with Tinkerbell’s pixie shimmer added — so her arrival fails to really feel just like the joyous or hopeful spark it should. And when Peter tussles along with his independently clever shadow, it’s barely seen because it traipses throughout the drab, darkish inexperienced partitions. Nothing pops, even when it’s imagined to.

Using golden heat as a visible metaphor units the stage for a movie the place mild and darkish do fixed battle, however darkness appears to inadvertently win, regardless of the way in which the story unfolds. When the impish Peter whisks Wendy and her brothers off to the ageless fantasy realm of Neverland, its lush inexperienced shores are lit with hints of daybreak mild — however the arrival of the villainous Hook (Jude Legislation) and his pirate crew brings darkish and moody clouds. These are solely sometimes pierced by rays of daylight each time Peter or another heroic character, like one of many Misplaced Boys — often Tiger Lily (Alyssa Wapanatâhk, in a job designed to be extra culturally delicate than her ’53 counterpart) — briefly saves the day.

Just like the Darlings’ family, the deck of Hook’s pirate ship is equally framed as an unlimited, imposing house captured with vast lenses, particularly when Wendy or any of the opposite kids are taken hostage. The large deck is sort of all the time populated by equally monumental pirates. Even in Neverland, the cruelty of the grownup world follows the Darling siblings.

Jude Law as Captain Hook in Peter Pan & Wendy, in a smirking closeup on his ship

Photograph: Eric Zachanowich/Disney

In these frightful moments, Peter instructs Wendy to focus on completely happy ideas to entry fairy powers — primarily flight, although the film finally takes some liberties with the thought. These moments come by way of fleeting however highly effective flashbacks, throughout which the movie’s lighting palette lastly bursts with glowing heat and luxury. Wendy’s recollections and fantasies of household are awash in daylight pouring in by home windows, and since they’re nonetheless captured with vast lenses, Lowery’s strategy to the grownup world begins to subtly shift, taking over a much less imposing tone. (That’s additionally because of a much less crowded body, or a minimum of, one much less crowded by cackling, cartoonish pirates.)

It’s all harking back to Terrence Malick’s frolicking, childlike lens in movies like The Tree of Life. Somewhat than trapping Wendy between visions of childhood fantasy and grownup cruelty, the movie affords her contrasting variations of maturity: one dominated by concern, and the opposite by love. That concept goes hand-in-hand with the movie’s strategy to its central theme, that rising up is inevitable, however the form it takes — heroism or villainy — is determined by how folks develop up. (The script, credited to Lowery and his frequent movie companion Toby Halbrooks, regularly hints at that sentiment, however seldom elaborates on it.)

This additionally results in one of many movie’s main story modifications. Hook begins out a musically mischievous, moustache-twirling baddie — his each phrase and motion is accompanied by the jingling notes of Daniel Hart’s rating, which evokes John Williams’ themes for Chris Columbus childhood classics like House Alone and the primary Harry Potter. However Lowery and Halbrooks imbue Hook with a tragic nuance, because of a deepening of his backstory that’s higher left un-spoiled. It matches completely throughout the sophisticated nexus of Wendy’s contrasting wishes, to each take unbiased cost of herself and to stay a daughter, a toddler with a mom and a household. These clashing visions of the long run additionally take form inside Peter Pan, the imp whose guarantees of perpetual childhood are on the heart of Lowery’s examination.

Lowery’s critique of the Peter Pan story will get emotionally uncooked — his Peter is simply as conflicted as his Hook, with simply as many sudden layers. However the remainder of the movie by no means really blossoms in its depictions of joyful potentialities.

There’s just one engaging end result for the story, so far as Wendy visualizes it: She fantasizes a couple of completely happy house and future, stuffed with heat, frolic, and household in the long run, although she’s leaving childhood behind. However there’s little stopping her from realizing it, since these visions are already her go-to “completely happy ideas” each time she makes an attempt to fly. This fantasy, which her mom spoke of, already lives in her thoughts as a vivid, summary hybrid between heat and vast angles, and no different imaginative and prescient of the long run however this one ever enters her ideas. Hypothetically, these pictures of her interior life, each actual and imagined, carry collectively the very best of each of the movie’s worlds: the glow of daylight harkened by Peter’s arrival, and the sheer enormity of maturity, in all its potentialities.

Alyssa Wapanatâhk as Tiger Lily in Peter Pan & Wendy, standing next to a white horse in a forest

Photograph: Eric Zachanowich/Disney

However that imagined concept is so highly effective in its conception that it supersedes something within the movie’s actuality. No precise scenes ever play out with something resembling the visible consolation of Wendy’s fantasies, even momentarily. No matter childhood heat Peter brings with him is fleeting, and he by no means presents Wendy with a worthwhile different to rising up. That flaw is available in half from Lowery hopping and skipping rapidly between storylines, with out a lot room for the characters to pause and mirror. Every part feels pre-ordained, and headed towards an eventuality the place Wendy involves a conclusion about her future with out really contemplating the options.

The place each the 1953 authentic Peter Pan and even Lowery’s Pete’s Dragon featured grownup characters recognizing some misplaced components of themselves and reminiscing about childhood whimsy, Peter Pan & Wendy incorporates a a lot dourer look into the previous, courtesy of Legislation’s Captain Hook. The remake’s audience is kids, who aren’t more likely to rationalize these particular person creative selections. However they are going to be able to choosing up on the movie’s overt musings about rising up being an inevitable a part of life. (See additionally: the Toy Story movies.)

Sadly, aside from its temporary scenes of flying, the remake swings to this point in the other way of the unique’s wistful nostalgia that it fails to current a lot of a childhood fantasy that is perhaps engaging to kids within the first place — whether or not as a matter of temptation for Wendy, or just as scenes into which younger viewers may be capable to escape.

Peter Pan & Wendy does have some thrilling vistas — occasional photographs of floating ships and characters leaping by the air at daybreak, which might’ve made for an alluring big-screen expertise had Disney determined to go that route — however even these flights of visible fantasy are uncommon. The movie’s trailers drew issues about its darkish visible tone, however its key concern isn’t an absence of sunshine. Somewhat, it’s the rarity with which mild is deployed. Lowery has a eager understanding of how that mild matches into this explicit story — one which zeroes in on the mildly discomforting implications of a hero who refuses to develop up — however the sparing strategy makes the choices for heat appear rarer, and the characters are flatter in consequence.

Getting into the grownup world could seem grim, however the different — a perpetual arrested improvement — could be simply as dour. Lowery’s new model units out to offset that concept by exposing the unseen attract {that a} full lifetime of maturity might have to supply. However regardless of his quite a few hints towards that refreshing take, the sunshine of this explicit promise stays principally obscured.

Peter Pan & Wendy is streaming on Disney Plus now.

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