Come Away - Review Thread

Come Away is a movie with so much potential and promise, two things it squanders with a mediocre script. The movie is essentially a reimagining of the origins of Peter Pan and Alice (of Wonderland); it changes their race while making them siblings. As you can already see, it's certainly a different take, one that certainly caught my interest enough to get me to watch it, partially because I've always been a fan of the Peter Pan mythos in particular. And so was the screenwriter of the film, apparently, because that's whom she bases more of the plot around, and that's sort of the problem. Yes, the film gives the Alice character the necessary development to get herself to Wonderland and provides Easter Eggs along the way to that whole mythology, but the focus between each feels unbalanced, and more in Peter's favor as I said. It gets to the point where having his sister be Alice in Wonderland ultimately feels pointless, as it has very little bearing on the overall plot. That, and the plot in general feels so loosely-constructed that for a 95-minute movie, it got around the halfway point and I was still wondering where this was all going and what the purpose was -- and not in a good way. The movie overall just left me feeling largely unmoved and rather empty, in spite of there being a couple of good things about it.

Said good things are that the film often has a nice adventurous and whimsical spirit while knowing when to pull back on that and let dramatic moments breathe. The performances are all uniformly solid, with the two main kids being rather delightful while David Oyelowo and Angelina Jolie are both solid as the parents. There's a good score, and I do like how the film interweaves certain elements of the Peter Pan story. But at the end of the day, Come Away just never comes together cohesively and feels more like a collection of interesting ideas without a solid throughline for them.