Jack Thorne’s Superb Netflix Adaptation

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.

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 of young men, both for better and worse (mostly worse), are boiled down to their terrifying essence.

There will be ample opportunities to sing the praises of Thorne’s scripting, which relies heavily on memorable dialogue from the book — “Sucks to your assmar!” has been a regular rejoinder in my family — and retains the book’s basic structure. I haven’t read Lord of the Flies in at least 35 years and Thorne’s versions of the characters are all more nuanced than I remember, though that could be a function of memory more than anything. I know why Piggy’s heroism and resiliency resonated with me as a kid, and Thorne maintains those aspects, without losing sight of the ways long-term exposure to Piggy might get irritating. When I was young, Jack seemed pretty monstrous and Thorne keeps his worst traits intact, while showing the insecurities and flaws of upbringing that would make him so dangerously unstable.

I never thought the dogmatic side of Adolescence was what the acclaimed series did best, and everything Adolescence had to say about how the petri dish of the internet cultivates the most virulent tendrils of masculinity is said better in Lord of the Flies. Think of this mysterious island as an unmoderated Reddit forum, complete with bullying and a growing distrust of difference, sentiment and vulnerability.

There will be ample opportunities to sing the praises of Munden’s direction, paired with the heavily digitally augmented cinematography from Mark Wolf. The four episodes are filled with eye-popping images, the enhanced green of the foliage and every verdant and precarious stretch of the island, but the show isn’t just visual candy. The set pieces start off harrowing and become downright nightmarish, including a breathless encounter with a CG boar, a nighttime celebration that leads to disorienting tragedy and the Very Bad Thing that happens at the story’s climax — a sequence that gets extended beyond what’s probably necessary without ever numbing viewers to a gut-punch that I remember vividly from my first reading.

Yes, four hours feels long, but for me it never felt too long. There are aspects of the story that are wish-fulfillment followed by the extended descent into horror. Taking time with the latter enhances the former. I never tired of the ravishing cinematography, naturalistic and operatic at once, nor some of Munden’s visual tricks, like documentary-style close-ups of the young actors, not necessarily doing anything, just existing. Perhaps the use of fish-eye lensing loses its novelty and the exotic camera angles occasionally feel more about showing off than taking us inside the story. But only occasionally.

Thorne and Munden will receive and deserve their ample plaudits, but more than anything I want to acknowledge Lord of the Flies as a triumph of casting. Nina Gold and Martin Ware have assembled an ensemble of unknown young actors in which any misjudged performance could have undermined the whole, but every selection is without flaw. McKenna embraces every inch of Piggy’s awkwardness, every desperate plea for acceptance and friendship, without polish or artificiality. Sawyers has the assertive charisma of a natural leader, with the fragility of a kid who might value popularity too much. Pratt makes Jack a hissable adversary — I immediately compared him to Draco Malfoy in my notes before discovering that Pratt had, indeed, already been cast in that role for HBO’s unnecessary upcoming series — but as sad and pathetic as he is evil, which is probably as it should be.

The best performance comes from Ike Talbut as Simon, a kid who finds himself stuck between the two factions. His work in the third episode is heartbreaking and layered, right in a “bookmark this name” way. But really, every performance, both the bigguns and the littluns, works in service of the whole, and Munden orchestrates their interactions in a way that suggests structured chaos. On the assumption that everything on-set was fully supervised at every turn, the results are frequently thrilling and ultimately haunting.

The previous Lord of the Flies adaptations, whatever their failings otherwise, were similarly showcases for casting discoveries. I’m sure the commercial and artistic risks of an ensemble with no established veterans — Rory Kinnear is memorable in a brief, flashback-driven role — partly explain why we haven’t gotten a new take on Lord of the Flies every few years.

Now we certainly don’t need another for a while. What Thorne, Munden and company have accomplished with this still all-too-relevant text may not be definitive, but it’s very close.