Lindsey P

The positive: my four-year-old paid attention and never freaked out, which he’s started to do with some movies that have scary scenes. I was kind of surprised at first, but I realized a lot of the frightening things happened offscreen in my imagination. It looked good, in some ways, and the main actors made the most of what they were given and any emotion I felt was mainly a credit to their delivery rather than the writing. Without following through it touched, briefly and lightly but so enticingly, the dark threads that many mainstream Peter Pan movies entirely omit but that weave their way all through the original story—as wonderful as it may be to imagine children never growing up, or living in our childhood dream worlds made real, it would be dreadful if it actually happened. I am very fond of the source material, I’ll just put that up front, but I was ready to appreciate this movie on its own merits. Cohesive story is very important to me, it’s the thing I notice more than anything else in a movie, and it’s usually the dealbreaker. This one wasn’t even a story in its own right. It was a reactive and rather childish critical review of the story it was supposed to be reshaping. I cannot imagine someone who had never encountered the original or a more faithful retelling of Peter Pan would have any notion what was going on or why anyone cared. I have such a person in my household, my husband, on whom I could try that experiment, but honestly, I wouldn’t consider it worth his time. It was like a teenager or young adult so busy living their life to disoblige their parents that they never had time to figure out what they actually wanted to make of themselves. I hope that kind of person only exists in my head, because that would be an even sadder waste of a life than this movie was of an opportunity to bend the resources of one of the richest companies in the world to fleshing out an actually new, creative and compelling story. Tinker Bell was absolutely beautiful, and I was okay with what they removed from her character, but as someone here has already observed, they didn’t replace it with much. Honestly I found her near-complete and heavily emphasized voicelessness kind of disturbing, which maybe I was supposed to, but it seems kind of hard on the actress, because I really think she could have done so much more than she was given the opportunity for. Also I could find no motive for her to follow Peter around and share her widely expanded magical abilities with him. Similar thing with Tiger Lily. They teased nuance and inclusiveness and deeper characterization, but in the end they didn’t really do all that much with it. Can I just say, I think the girl slap is one of the stupidest pseudo-feminist cliches. It would be totally unacceptable for an audience to cheer a man slapping a woman. There’s no argument in favor of allowing it the other way round that is good for women’s equality.