Alas, Steven Spielberg seems bereft of any real answer to this question, his only response being to have Peter rediscovering how to be childlike again. Being Spielberg, the film seems to lack the adult emotional vocabulary to tell the story in any way other than maudlin sentiment. The Disney Peter Pan, for all its faults, at least opened up with a sense of unalloyed pre-adolescent adventure. Hook however becomes bogged down in a Spiebergian mawkishness. A constant theme in Steven Spielberg’s films is that he sees that the greatest possible happiness in life is a happy family – thus, rather than rediscovering his childhood, Hook has the banal resolution of Peter Pan discovering that he has neglected his kids, while even Captain Hook seems to want to become a substitute father.

Certainly, when it comes to sentiment there are few who can create images that have such longing emotional appeal as Steven Spielberg – the moment Peter rediscovers his ability to fly is exhilarating, and the images of a young girl singing in a broken-voice about missing her mother or of the tiny Tinkerbell attempting to shade the baby Peter from the rain with a leaf are incredibly touching. As with most Steven Spielberg films, it is very much a case of surrendering to Spielberg’s spell or not at all – and for those resistant to Spielberg, Hook offers more than usual that can be ‘resisted’. Steven Spielberg’s greatest failing as a director is an over-enthusiasm with slapstick – it was something that killed 1941 (1979) and the first two Indiana Jones sequels – and the sequences with the Lost Boys indulging in food fights and manic skate board chases become tiresomely noisy.

Hook is a film that often becomes lost in its own size – the production and costume design is so densely textured and colourful that the film almost drowns in it, yet for all that Hook is strangely stagebound. Spielberg never manages to pull back to show any exteriors of Captain Hook’s ship, for instance. One also expected more from the big name actors present. Hook was the beginning of Robin Williams’s descent towards soft-headed family movie mush – and in toning down the manic extrovert personality he was known for up to that point, Williams seems uncomfortably twee. His is not a Peter Pan that seems to bounce with rediscovered youthful vibrance in his step, rather he seems awkwardly roly-poly. An unrecognisable Dustin Hoffman, who at least does a perfect job of imitating the mannerisms of the Hook in the Disney version of the film, presents too comic a character to hold any threat. The result is one of the usually great Steven Spielberg’s less inspired films.

Steven Spielberg’s other genre films are:– Duel (1971), Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Twilight Zone – The Movie (1983), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Always (1989), Jurassic Park (1993), The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), A.I. (2001), Minority Report (2002), War of the Worlds (2005), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) and The Adventures of Tintin (2011).

Other adaptations of Peter Pan include:- the classic Disney animated version Peter Pan (1953); Peter Pan (1955), a live tv play; Peter Pan (1976), a tv movie version with Mia Farrow!!! playing Peter; the animated tv series Peter Pan and the Pirates (1990); Peter Pan (tv movie, 2000); and the big-budget live-action Peter Pan (2003). There was also the fascinating but little-seen Neverland (2003), which gave Peter Pan a modernised interpretation with Peter a kid suffering from bipolar disorder; and the tv mini-series Neverland (2011), which offered a science-fictional rationalisation set on an alien planet. Other versions of the story include:- Disney’s animated theatrical sequel Return to Never Land (2002) and the series of Tinkerbell dvd-released films with TinkerBell (2008), Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure (2009), Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue (2010), Tinker Bell: A Winter Story (2011) and Tinker Bell: Race Through the Seasons (2012). Finding Neverland (2004) was a biopic about J.M. Barrie, and offered a heavily fictionalised account of the writing of Peter Pan.