Peter Pan & Wendy Shows the Doomed Romance of David Lowery and Disney

Peter Pan & Wendy is finally on Disney+, meaning someone somewhere has taken a deep sigh, walked over to a large corkboard reading “GREAT DIRECTORS WHO HAVE PREMIERED ON STREAMING,” and crossed out David Lowery’s picture. The film is everything we feared: staggeringly uninteresting. The kid actors do a terrific job, especially Ever Anderson (Milla Jovovich and Paul W.S. Anderson’s daughter) as Wendy, and the odd maritime shanty and “Lost Boy versus pirate” scuffle raise some amusement, but it feels too laborious, ineffectual and flimsy to linger in the imagination–a symptom of modern Disney streaming fare.

A sub-average Peter Pan adaptation in recent memory is nothing new (see Joe Wright’s Pan and Benh Zeitlin’s Wendy), but this one comes with a stamp of enforced authenticity by Disney: This is the hallowed live-action remake, the prestige treatment of any well-crafted animation [citation needed], meaning it must be considered the official, esteemed and genuine artifact, as only this Peter Pan will strengthen Disney’s brand.

In reality, it does anything but (we are four years past collective exhaustion with these updates), but the path that has led us here can’t be traced by a timeline you’d see at a Disney shareholders expo. Instead, we must look through the lens of a superior collaboration between Lowery and the House of Mouse: Pete’s Dragon.

The original Pete’s Dragon, a 1977 hybrid live-action/animation from Disney’s Dark Age, is a near-total dud. The characters are grating, the sentimentality forced and phony, and—clocking in an egregious 128 minutes—it’s a bonafide slog. Any fond memories of runaway wildling Pete and his oversized animated dragon Elliot are by and large conditioned by nostalgia; when you think of Pete’s Dragon, you’ll more likely reminisce about the clamshell VHS case it came in than the actual film.

So when Disney started picking up steam on live-action reimaginings of their classics, the choice to spend $65 million on a curio from Disney’s least exciting era was a bit baffling–but by then we were barely familiar with the director behind the remake, David Lowery. Before 2016, Lowery had delved into folksy Americana with St. Nick and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, and boarded Pete’s Dragon initially only as screenwriter. But his passion for the project grew into a directing gig as well. It wasn’t until after his Disney debut that Lowery made a prominent name for himself in arthouse, melancholic fantasy with the sublime A Ghost Story and The Green Knight, even finding time to direct a bank robber caper for Robert Redford’s swan song in between.

Amongst a filmography of exclusively artful efforts, Pete’s Dragon stands out for being, well, a Disney live-action remake. But Lowery’s film, on a much smaller scale than the likes of The Lion King or Aladdin, imagines a better version of Pete and Elliot’s story, imbuing it with a warmth that feels like a natural evolution of the Disney tale, while still abiding by Lowery’s style and tone. Sure, the night scenes are too dark to see anything in, and it doesn’t pack the emotional wallop you want from a magical-creature-best-friend story, but it’s the rare live-action remake to have its own identity, actually shaving 20 minutes off the original rather than adding it.

But seven years have past, and the Disney machine has evolved into something more terrifying, maddening and artless. Since Pete’s Dragon, Disney+ has become the corporation’s priority, further alienating talent within their big machine. Film and television are valued less by individual merit, and more by how much they contribute to brand posterity and potency. Now Disney is constantly available, with on demand Disney whenever you want it, so it must increase its output so people never at any point think that Disney isn’t offering them enough. Their creative goal is now more transparent than it was before: We must make people think Disney is still strong, current and viable.

The problem with Lowery’s Peter Pan is not that the story doesn’t suit the director–quite the opposite, as tales of childhood abandon, fears of time marching on, and digging up emotional complexity from simple stories are all within Lowery’s wheelhouse. The problem is that the project was doomed from the start; Disney is leading the market on undermining their own media by being visibly, venomously uninterested in quality control. What use is content that doesn’t further their ouroboric impulses?

Peter Pan & Wendy is no Turning Red or Prey: This film is not a miracle of quality that deserves the big-screen treatment. Lowery’s latest is a frontrunner for his worst, a dingy, tired exercise that feels more formality than fairytale. In many ways, it fits right in with a lot of Disney+’s original programming–an icon on the home screen that needs you to press play and stick around long enough for the streaming data to calculate how best to optimize their next piece of content. This gets Lowery off the hook; rather than a thoughtful, flopping labor of love like The Green Knight, his biggest failure has ended up being the one that matters the least, and the one least capable of being brilliant.

Compared to the soullessness that went into The Lion King, or the red flags thrown up by the upcoming treatment of The Little Mermaid, it’s possible to feel a little sympathetic for Lowery–he is not a studio yes man like Jon Favreau or Rob Marshall, but someone who came to this project with a passion that, whether his fault or Disney’s, could not translate into exciting adventure.

It’s night and day when compared to Pete’s Dragon, a film that doesn’t wow but does charm.  Its vision is smaller but doesn’t undermine its value, and its greatest asset is how it doesn’t align with the worst product from the Walt Disney Live-Action Remake Processing Plant. But don’t you feel a tinge of depression at valuing a family film as being “less soulless” compared to others? Will all non-original Disney fare be fated to appreciate over time when it’s contrasted by future, ever-increasing artlessness? Understanding how fake Disney’s appeal to childhood wonder really is seems like one of the many curses of adulthood, one we were gratefully spared of as children. When it comes to Disney, maybe, like Peter Pan, we should have elected to never grow up.

Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.