Anyone who knows me at all will tell you: I am a big Disney fan. I most especially love the classics—101 Dalmatians, Aristocats, The Fox and the Hound—and the princess movies (Tangled, Beauty & the Beast, and The Little Mermaid). Recently, Disney has been re-making some of the classics with live-action (and heavy use of CGI). Some of these I thought were pretty good; I loved Maleficent, I thought Cinderella added some interesting character depth and dialog pieces, and Jasmine’s costumes in Aladdin were amazing. Some remakes I’ve been pretty indifferent about; The Little Mermaid remake had some good points and some bad points but was fine overall. Lion King was a cinematic masterpiece already and did not need to be redone.

Last night we watched Peter Pan & Wendy. Unlike the other so-so movies, this one I thought was actively bad. So bad, in fact, that I woke up this morning still thinking about it. So, to get it out of my system, I’m going to share a little rant with you. (Expect spoilers galore!)

First and most importantly, I felt throughout the movie like the writers couldn’t decide on their theme. You’d think it would be obvious; Peter Pan’s story has always been about the importance of growing up, even if it’s scary. From the first play (which literally included the subtitle “The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up”), through to adaptations like Hook, and to the first cartoon, the story has always had the same theme. Growing up is good. Some of them expand on the theme; it’s important to keep a bit of child-like joy and imagination as you grow up. But none of the stories have said that growing up is actually bad. (The TV show “Once Upon a Time” even went so far as it cast Captain Hook as the redeemed and lovable villain-turned-hero and Peter Pan as the out-and-out kidnapping, child-killing villain.)

Peter Pan & Wendy, on the other hand, can’t seem to decide if growing up is good or not. On the surface, the movie seems to say that growing up is good. Wendy goes on the grand adventure in Neverland, then returns home with the Lost Boys and apologizes to her mother, saying she is ready to go to boarding school now. Her happy thoughts shift from memories of her childhood to dreams of adulthood. We even get the iconic “To die would be an awfully great adventure” quote restated from Wendy as “You know, I think growing up might just be the greatest adventure of all.” (Or something along those lines, I’m doing this all from memory after watching it once.) So far, so good, right?

Except.

Except that Captain Hook is presented as being evil specifically because he grew up. (The movie actually introduces the idea with the quote “he grew up… he grew up wrong” but then later the second half of this gets dropped.) At one point, Wendy confronts Peter Pan about Hook. [At the time this conversation takes place, she has seen no redeeming actions from Hook; he has shot her (and Peter) out of the sky, he has attempted to execute her brothers in a location with skeletons of people he did successfully execute, and she has faced him down in order to save her brothers by saying “Gentlemen don’t kill children!” She saw him do his absolute best to kill Peter.] Wendy has no reason to like or defend Hook at all… and yet the conversation goes something like this:

Peter tells her about how he and Hook were once best friends, then Hook left Neverland, and when he came back, he was “evil.” Wendy listens to this, then asks Peter, “Was Hook evil, or just grown up?”

Like I said, at this point, Wendy has no reason to see Captain Hook as anything less than evil. And yet she decides to defend his evilness by saying… what… that all adults are murderous pirates? That from a child’s perspective all adults look incomprehensible and evil? I’m not really sure where they were going with this.

Immediately after this conversation, Wendy discovers that her singing (a nonsensical lullaby about the joys of growing up) has led the pirates to discover the Lost Boys. Hook kills Peter Pan (or at least, everyone believes he does) and Wendy and all the Lost Boys are taken to Hook’s ship. So much for the “yay adulthood” message of the song.

While in she is being held in the brig, Hook and Wendy have a very heartfelt conversation even more bizarre than the one she shared with Peter. Wendy empathizes with Hook (again, we have no idea why because she has just seen him “murder” Peter Pan) and theorizes that Hook didn’t leave Neverland voluntarily but was driven out of Neverland because Peter Pan didn’t like him (Hook) remembering his mother. (Hook confirms this is true.) So, we kind of get this glimpse that Peter clinging to his childhood is a bad thing. Okay, I’m thinking, here we go, we’re going to find out that Hook is actually not a bad guy (despite all evidence shown to us on screen thus far—including killing one of his own crew for saying “Peter Pan” which Hook himself does several times throughout the script). We’re going to somehow redeem Hook and therefore redeem adulthood.

But nope. Hook and Wendy have a wonderful, heart-wrenching conversation about how evil Peter Pan is and then Hook turns around and orders all the Lost Boys executed. Immediately. Definitely in-keeping with his characterization but just bizarre for the movie’s supposed theme.

Wendy grandly sacrifices herself for the Lost Boys, particularly her brothers, and convinces Hook that they can be “raised to be good pirates.” (It is implied earlier that Hook himself only became a pirate because he was raised by Mr. Smee and the pirate crew. So maybe the theme of the movie is that you need to be careful to grow up “right” and not “wrong” like Hook? We’ll get back to that idea in a minute.) It is interesting that Wendy seems to be confirming the idea of “nurture” over “nature” by saying her brothers and the Lost Boys will be easily corrupted as they grow up. Granted, that’s what she needs to say to save their lives, but it’s an interesting statement to put in a movie about growing up.

Hook accepts her sacrifice, she walks the plank, Tinkerbelle saves the day, we get some good sword fights… Skip to the end scene.

The Lost Boys, plus Wendy, her brothers, Peter Pan and Tinkerbelle all sail the fairy-dusted pirate ship back to London. Wendy meets her mother on the staircase outside her room and starts to apologize for not wanting to go away to boarding school and grow up. Cue music and mother/daughter bonding. Except then it turns out that Wendy is just trying to stall her parents from going into the nursery where the Lost Boys and her brothers are trashing the place. We’re left with no indicators whether the apology was sincere or not.

While her parents are confronting the jungle children now taking over the 3^rd floor of the house, Wendy somehow sneaks onto the roof to meet Peter Pan. She discovers that this used to be his exact house; he hasn’t been running from his past all this time but returning to it! This leads to (another) emotional conversation where Wendy repeats all of the wisdom that her mother used (unsuccessfully) in the opening scene to try to convince her to go to boarding school happily. Oh good, we get to see that the heroine has learned her lesson and now she is passing on her wisdom… which does nothing, again. That’s right, all of her learning may have made her want to grow up, but it doesn’t work on Peter Pan. He flies back to Neverland with Tinkerbelle.

Now, I know some people would have thrown a fit if Peter Pan decided to stay and grow up. Being the eternal child is his “thing” and I get that. But if the theme is that growing up is important, then Peter’s decision not to stay and do so should have a hint of tragedy. There’s no sense of that in the scene. Instead it seems to be taken for granted that Wendy chose what’s right for her and Peter Pan chose what’s right for him.

The last thing we see (before an ‘after credit extra’ type scene in Neverland) is Wendy carving her name under Peter Pan’s on the brickwork of the (destroyed) chimney in a nice title drop. But it made me wonder, if the theme is about “growing up” then why not just call the movie Wendy? If this story is about her journey and her discovery and her decision, why call it Peter Pan & Wendy?

So… is growing up good or not? Is Peter Pan wrong to cling to his childhood? Is Wendy going to grow up right? Is Hook evil or just an adult?

The movie leaves it all hanging.

So maybe, you might be tempted to say, the theme is to “grow up right.” I tried to tell myself that, but it just doesn’t fit. They make no indication of what “right” or “wrong” is, except that killing is obviously bad. Hook himself even points out: “…show me a child who knows right from wrong…” which seems to echo the whole theme of Peter Pan being too childish to accept help, share fame, or let the Lost Boys miss their mothers. So you have to grow up in order to know right from wrong… but you have to grow up right… but how you grow up depends on who you grow up with? (This is something children don’t get to pick, incidentally.) But hey, maybe this is the theme! You need to lean on other people, be around your family, and grow up right that way!

In the opening scenes when Mother Darling is trying to convince Wendy to go to boarding school, she tells Wendy, “Your brothers need you to set an example,” or something like that and Wendy shoots back: “By leaving them to go away to school?” Mother has no answer for this rebuttal; maybe the theme of the movie is about leaning on others/being family. The point is made several times later in the movie that Peter Pan is not the lone wolf hero he thinks he is; he succeeds because of help from Tiger Lily, Tinkerbelle, etc. Yay! Maybe we finally found a theme! Except this too is undermined by the ending: Wendy accepts going away to school (we think) and Peter Pan abandons his friends and goes back to Neverland alone. (Tinkerbelle follows him back, but that’s after he leaves.)

So, as established, the movie has no theme.

But hey, maybe it has other redeeming qualities! It has a diverse cast, for instance! This cast includes:

• Lost Boys who are female. This is pointed out as soon as the Lost Boys are introduced, in case you missed the casting choices or think they’re all dressed so androgenous you can’t tell for sure. But since there is no agency from any Lost Boy nor anything to distinguish them from each other, this inclusion kind of falls flat.
• A Cree-speaking Tigerlily (who is honestly pretty awesome). Cool! And she is speaking Cree to people who clearly don’t understand it when she also speaks perfect English… why? And why are there are grown up Indians in Neverland at all? They’re not mermaids or fairies. They’re real people.   
• A black Tinkerbelle… whom no one can understand. Really Disney? The one character who is voiceless, and kind of Pan’s servant/sidekick, and that’s who you make black? Oh, and when she finally finds someone who can understand her (Wendy), Tinkerbelle decides to go back to Neverland with the eternal boy-child whom—we are more or less told—not only doesn’t understand Tinkerbelle but makes up what he thinks she is saying and passes it off to others as him translating. He literally speaks for her (over her) for 95% of the film.
• A Peter Pan who is… not a red-head. He’s a British national who looks like he could be Indian, Hispanic, Middle Easter and/or Latin American. But with new Ariel being barely a red-head and now Peter Pan also losing the red locks, it looks like Disney knows what look they don’t want.

The movie soundtrack is definitely not worth writing home about. It includes a creepy lullaby, a creepier pirate song, and none of the classics we love like “You Can Fly” or “Your Mother and Mine.”

Furthermore, this is NOT a movie for young kids. The movie is rated PG but it includes:

• The pirates shooting a cannon at Wendy, Peter, John & Michael which certainly appears to do very realistic damage. (Followed by Peter being missing and presumed dead for several scenes.)
• Captain Hook killing a crewman, walking over his dead body, and Mr. Smee saying that this has happened twice already this month. Hook indicates he expects it will happen at least once more.
• A very large, very realistic crocodile which eats people. Technically, it’s (barely) off-screen eating of people, but still pretty clear eating of people.
• Hook slashing open Peter Pan’s chest, and Peter Pan falling ten or more stories. (This doesn’t actually kill him, maybe due to the pixie dust in his body which then leaves, but it’s still a pretty graphic “death” scene for a kid to watch.)
• Actual skeletons, one of which is named (“poor Robert”), who are explicitly said to be past victims of Hook.
• Hook attempting to execute John & Michael by chaining them to a rock while the water rises around them.

There were several times last night while watching it that my husband and I turned to each other and said, “This is a kids’ movie?”

There were some good moments. We didn’t turn it off, after all. I particularly enjoyed the moment when Peter Pan apologizes to Captain Hook for being a bad friend. I thought it was an extremely well-done apology with no excuses. Tigerlily’s costuming was sooooo good. The sword fights were fun, and Pan’s shadow was very interesting. In fact, they did quite a bit with his shadow rather than just having it “run away” in the opening scene and never be mentioned again. It was a cute movie. If I was with people who wanted to watch it, I’d watch it again though I wouldn’t pick it for myself.

It’s just that all in all, I found it disappointing. For whim and whimsy, I would tell you to watch the animated version. For a great and underappreciated classic, watch Hook. For me, Peter Pan & Wendy is just one more checkmark under the “Why Bother?” column of Disney’s non-animated remakes.

Hopefully, with this out of my system, I will be able to return to writing for Sloan Script. Thanks for reading, folks!