Note: This article was originally posted on my Patreon under “Monday Musings” several weeks ago.
I was struck by one line in particular while watching the new trailer for David Lowery’s Peter Pan & Wendy, which dropped this morning. In the opening seconds, Wendy’s mother says, “you can’t stop time, Wendy, whether you like it or not.” As soon as I heard that sentence, the voice in my head said, “yep, that’s David Lowery.”
Peter Pan & Wendy has been the target of a pretty significant amount of vitriol and hatred ever since the first teaser trailer released in February. Much of this hatred has stemmed from the usual suspects of reactionary “GoNE wOkE!!” channels, absolutely furious to see a dark-skinned Tinkerbell or Peter Pan sharing a title with Wendy. Just head on down to the comments section of the teaser and you’ll get a little taste of the particular viewpoint the haters are coming from; their running joke this past year has been the copypasta of saying “I loved the part when [insert fake woke thing] happened.” You’ll scroll through hordes and hordes of comments like “I loved the part where the Lost Boys said ‘we're the lost they/them.’ That was truly eye-opening,” or “I loved the part where Wendy reminded Captain Hook of his white privilege, truly inspiring.” We’ve got some impressive comedians out there, folks. These comments make me want to never use the internet again.
Even outside of those reactionary circles with snarky alcoholic wolf avatars, though, many have tossed out the usual comments like “who asked for this?!” and “Disney can’t come up with anything original anymore,” at this particular remake. I can’t totally blame those people; with almost every other live-action remake under the sun, I tend to count myself among them. The Little Mermaid looks almost criminally cheap and soulless. The news of a live-action Moana this past week was an ATL for me. That’s all-time-low, not Atlanta.
Here’s the thing, though: Peter Pan & Wendy is different, man. This is David Lowery, the director who made Disney’s best live-action remake to date, Pete’s Dragon, along with masterpieces like A Ghost Story, The Old Man and The Gun, and The Green Knight. I’d daresay that he’s among my favorite contemporary American filmmakers, along with Rian Johnson and Jordan Peele and Greta Gerwig. This certainly might be his “one for them,” movie, working on the assembly line for a major franchise before he can go back to something more arthouse, but I’d say it’s much closer to Gerwig’s Barbie than Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin.
Why? Well, for one thing, look at it.
Yes, the opening sequences in London can look a little dim and muddy if you’re watching it with YouTube compression on your phone. There’s a whole dialogue to be had there, about Lowery’s pre-existing love of natural light conditions paired with the recent dimness of many streaming movies in general—but if you watch past the first 30 seconds and get to Neverland, the movie looks gorgeous. There’s a really tactile, tangible sense that the actors are actually feeling the sunlight on their faces and the grass beneath their feet that has been lacking from so many of the soundstage-heavy remakes in recent years. Some of the fantastic vistas and landscapes here look pulled straight out of The Green Knight or even Willow, and their on-location-ness makes Neverland feel like a truly beautiful natural environment, unlike some of the CG-heavy screensaver hellscapes in recent remakes like Alice Through The Looking Glass and the new Little Mermaid.
Almost everything about the aesthetic here screams that it’s David Lowery’s personal adaptation of the Peter Pan source material; there are some references to the animated film’s costumes scattered in there, but on the whole, it feels more like a particular director’s reimagining of the story than a soulless frame-by-frame recreation of the original. And if they’re making these remakes, that’s all I can ask for: something that doesn’t feel like a remake.
And then there’s what David Lowery has said about Peter Pan & Wendy. I still remember when he was doing press for The Green Knight, saying how excited he was for people to see what he was cooking up next with Peter Pan. Toward the end of production on the film, he even stated, "I think, personally speaking, Peter Pan & Wendy is my favorite thing I've ever made, which I wasn't expecting going into it, but it is. I've never been as in love with a movie as I am with this one…it's the most personal thing I've ever made.” Most of Lowery’s movies have felt pretty personal to begin with, so that’s a pretty huge claim to make. I trust the guy enough to believe he’s telling the truth!
Have you heard Lowery talk about the way he pitched the aesthetic and tone of the movie to Disney? Ya might have missed it, but he said this: “when I went to talk to the studio about it, I was like ‘What if we made The Revenant with flying kids?' And they were into it. It’s not 100% like that, but it’s sort of the ethos by which we’ve gone about making it...that was sort of the idea, have it be visceral, have it be grounded, but still joyful, still full of exuberance and magic.”
The Revenant with flying kids might sound insane (and perhaps a little exaggerated for a Disney Plus family movie) but it’s worth noting that a significant number of the crew on The Revenant actually worked on Peter Pan & Wendy. And then there’s the unrelated fact that we’re going to get another Daniel Hart banger musical score!
I could go on. The frequent collaborators of Lowery, like the cinematographer who worked on Pete’s Dragon, are all back for this one. There’s a lot to be excited about.
David said recently that The Green Knight and Peter Pan & Wendy feel like “a pair of siblings with a lot in common.” The way he thought about adapting the classic literary source material was the same for both of them: “All the things that mattered to me about Green Knight, all the things that were important to me, I’ve carried over to Peter Pan & Wendy. I approached it exactly the same way, especially because I’m dealing with a text that is beloved to me. It is very near and dear to my heart. I want to honor it, and I also want to illuminate it to the best of my abilities with my own perspective.”
It’s all of this background which ultimately led me to hear that opening line—“you can’t stop time, Wendy, whether you like it or not”—and instantly realize exactly how Peter Pan & Wendy is continuing everything that David Lowery was already exploring in Green Knight and even A Ghost Story. So much of Lowery’s filmography explores the passage of time; A Ghost Story is about one man’s ghost staying in his house as his widowed wife moves out and watching centuries pass without him; The Green Knight grapples with the way time consumes and devours us like the moss growing in the ruins of a church. Even The Old Man and The Gun depicts an aging outlaw coming to terms with the end of his own era.
It's this ongoing wrestle with the theme of time which makes me all the more eager to see how David Lowery comes to terms with the concept in Peter Pan & Wendy, where characters will inevitably find that they don’t want to grow up but they must do it eventually. Perhaps there’s a continuing narrative to be found in Lowery’s own coming to terms with this idea throughout his projects.
Even before he worked on Peter Pan, David Lowery once described his entire filmography as “my series of bedtime stories,” a line that feels like it could apply particularly well to any of his movies, but might have culminated in Peter Pan & Wendy:
“Every single one of them feels like a fable or a bedtime story. I’ve often referred to them myself as fairy tales. They’ve always felt distanced from reality. They’ve never felt completely tethered to the real world. They all had this through line, this surrealist approach to reality that is very much in keeping with my own perspective on the world.”
I’m very excited to see just what that perspective on the world will look and feel like when this releases at the end of April. I just wish we were able to see it in theaters, man!
retweet to all of this — i'm hosting a movie party this friday as a way of getting friends to watch. i think we're in for a treat with this one!