'Lord of the Flies' Review: Jack Thorne's Superb Netflix Adaptation
'Lord of the Flies'
Redza/Eleven/Sony Pictures Television/Netflix
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Lord of the Flies, William Golding‘s 1954 novel, is one of those properties that feels like it has constantly been adapted for the screen — even though beyond films by Peter Brook (1963) and Harry Hook (1990), both intriguing yet imperfect, it has actually very rarely been adapted.
Sure, there was a 1975 Filipino movie and the Simpsons episode “Das Bus,” but at that point you’re looking at texts inspired by, but not exactly adapted from, Lord of the Flies. And that’s when the floodgates open, because few texts of the past 100 years are more inextricably woven into our culture.
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Lord of the Flies
The Bottom Line
Very close to a definitive adaptation.
Airdate: Monday, May 4 (Netflix)
Cast: Winston Swayers, Lox Pratt, David McKenna, Ike Talbut
Writer: Jack Thorne
Director: Marc Munden
Without Lord of the Flies, there’s no Battle Royale, no Yellowjackets, no The 100, no Survivor and no Kid Nation. We wouldn’t have classics like Lost, intriguing curios like The Society, thoroughly forgotten offerings like The Wilds or utter garbage like The I-Land. Sure, it’s easy to say that Lord of the Flies itself is basically Robinson Crusoe meets Tom Brown’s School Days meets The Most Dangerous Game, but from 1954 on, the strongest strain of DNA in these kinds of stories goes back to Golding.
Writer Jack Thorne and director Marc Munden‘s Lord of the Flies, produced for BBC iPlayer and BBC One (with Australia’s Stan) long before Netflix acquired American distribution, is sure to trigger a new assortment of comparisons in your mind.
Thanks to Thorne’s involvement, it’s easy to see Lord of the Flies as a kind of tropical Adolescence — a reminder that young men had dangerously flawed primal instincts long before the internet misdirected them. Thanks to the propulsive score by Cristobal Tapia de Veer, again blending the animalistic and the choral (with musical cameos from Benjamin Britten, among others), it’s easy to recognize that The White Lotus has always been Lord of Flies, with turndown service.
But the four-hour series’ greatest achievement is that, for all the inevitable comparisons one might be tempted to make, this Lord of the Flies is wholly its own thing, as audacious and yet devoted to its source material as any TV adaptation in recent memory.
Though Lord of the Flies surely suffers from some of the bloat endemic to streaming, even its excesses come in the name of emotional potency. The series is determined to make sure that its most devastating moments hit hard, and if that requires extending those pivotal scenes beyond what was strictly necessary, nobody seems worried.
And despite its familiarity to nearly anybody who has taken middle school English over the past eight decades, the story still retains the power to shock.
The series, set at some point in the 1950s, begins on a lush, tropical island somewhere. A plane has crashed and, for whatever reason, none of the adults survived.
We’re introduced first to David McKenna‘s pudgy, myopic Nicky, crushed by the cruelty of youth with the nickname “Piggy.”
Piggy, possessed of endless random trivia and a devotion to outdated popular culture introduced to him by his aunt, soon meets confident and amiable Ralph (Winston Sawyers) and, with the help of a handy conch, they round up the dozens of surviving children.
There are the “littluns,” children of around five or six, eager to be guided and supervised.
Then there’s a choir from a tony academy, an instantly rowdy group led by tow-headed Jack (Lox Pratt), the juvenile embodiment of British public school privilege.
Following Piggy’s lead, Ralph advocates for structure and responsibility, including building shelter and starting a signal fire.
Following his own entitlement, Jack advocates for having fun and bucking against the confines of the adult world.
In an election, Ralph is voted tribal leader, while Jack and his choir boys reluctantly accept the responsibilities of hunting and keeping the fire — ignited with the help of Piggy’s thick spectacles — going.
It takes very little time for Jack to decide he doesn’t respect Ralph’s attempts at maturity. That creates a fissure among the survivors, an escalating conflict through which the behaviors