Peter Pan & Wendy - Review Thread

Disney’s live action remakes are something to be looked at with suspicion at the best of times and doubly so when they’re being sent directly to Disney+ but I must say I did hold out some hope for this one if only because it was directed by David Lowery, a serious filmmaker who had been behind the 2016 Pete’s Dragon which is the one of these movies most people agree is relatively dignified. I also thought that maybe the direct to Disney+ nature of this meant that it could be smaller and riskier than some of the rest of these. Well, that was mostly for naught. Looked at as the new David Lowery movie this is a crushing disappointment. Looked at as a Direct-to-Disney+ live action remake separate from those expectations and it is… well I guess it’s in “it could be worse” territory. You can see some traces of a more interesting adaptation here and there in elements of the film’s visual style, the cast is mostly fine, and it also has a fairly interesting climactic setpiece on a flying pirate ship that I appreciated a little. But beyond that this has much bigger problems… including the fact that it’s a remake of Peter Pan, which is one of Disney’s weakest “animated classics” to begin with and frankly Peter Pan is just generally a bad story that leads to bad adaptations: Hook is also bad, Pan was reportedly a disaster, I don’t hear great things about the 2003 adaptation… it’s just a story they need to leave behind. If you must see a version of the Peter Pan story made by an indie director a better movie to check out is Benh Zeitlin’s Wendy which is a lot closer to what I was maybe hoping David Lowery could do with this property and basically the only version of this story I’ve seen that’s even remotely salvageable. As for this one, well a lot of it is still taken from the Disney movie so it’s redundant in that way, but unlike Disney’s other live action remakes this doesn’t even have particularly good production values and the effects for the Tinkerbelle stuff in it looks particularly bad, bordering on unprofessional. It’s certainly not as bad as something like Robert Zemeckis’ Pinocchio but that’s a pretty low bar to clear.