A very fancy version of Lord of the Flies is playing on Netflix as a four-part series, loaded up with arty flourishes like distorting fish-eye lens shots, blurred-out flashbacks, extreme slo-mo, many choppy montages, and a dramatically expressionistic color scheme. Some imagery is so desaturated, it’s basically black-and-white, and some imagery so saturated and CGI-ed, the jungle foliage is as bloodred as a slaughterhouse. Bombastic classical music thrums throughout to let you know this is an important work for the ages.

There are people who like this sort of thing. Those people are critics, who are falling all over themselves praising the script by playwright/screenwriter/producer Jack Thorne and the direction of Marc Munden. It seems Thorne had already won them over with the 2025 miniseries Adolescence, about a troubled thirteen-year-old British schoolboy suspected of murdering a girl who rejected his advances. Thorne’s version of Lord of the Flies is being perceived as a brilliant period companion piece to Adolescence.

I myself have a weakness for formal inventiveness, but this just feels like showing off. This Lord of the Flies is so padded, so full of pointless distractions, so insistent on its own profundity, it generates a sense of weird aesthetic gloating over its source material, William Golding’s famous 1954 novel about a group of preadolescent British schoolboys being evacuated during wartime, who crash-land and are stranded on an island without adult supervision and swiftly descend into savagery.

It was hard to stay with it till the end. No wonder its audience scores are rotten.

The four-hour experience is saved by the acting of the boys, almost none of whom are trained professionals. They ground the whole thing in a kind of straightforward empathy for the characters they play. Which isn’t so easy, given the way the lead characters Golding wrote are busy representing modern British archetypes. How many sad little essays had to be written about Piggy representing scientific rationality, with Simon bringing the saintly Christian spirituality, while Ralph stands for the civilizing democratic order, and Jack goes swaggering around menacingly as the embodiment of fascism rising to power?

David McKenna is the standout as Piggy, that chubby bespectacled little logician and sacrificial lamb. McKenna manages to be both officious and adorable, as Piggy uses his own practical intellect to push forward into a leadership position the bright, handsome, likable Ralph (Winston Sawyers).

Opposing them in everything is the envious Jack (Lox Pratt), desperate to cover up his own fears and appear cool before his worshipful followers. As Jack, Pratt is tall, thin, blond, and effete, bringing the look of a discontented glam rocker to the role. He seems like a natural for his casting as Draco Malfoy in the new HBO Harry Potter series.

And belonging nowhere is the spiritual Simon, played by Ike Talbut with big-eyed solemnity. He’s regarded by even Piggy and Jack as rather “batty,” and he’s a character designed by William Golding to be deliberately Christlike — which doesn’t bode well for him.

Each of these main characters is given his own episode in the series, when his point of view dominates and his backstory is explored. The first episode belongs to Piggy and begins with his coming to consciousness in the jungle after the plane crash. The novel begins with an emphasis on Ralph, soon to be joined by Piggy, and Ralph is so completely enraptured by a kind of child’s fantasy come true — a deserted island and no grown-ups — that he’s quite rude to and impatient with Piggy for over half of the book.

But at least, it’s a very streamlined book, something you can read in a few hours, shooting straight as an arrow from the boys’ stranding through their survival efforts, fundamental disagreements, and rapid descent into barbaric violence, before ending on their grim rescue. That’s the opposite of the Thorne–Munden approach, which is forever lingering on opulent aesthetic effects or lurching into flashbacks.

Whether you might like this adaptation better than I did obviously depends on how you relate to Thorne’s adaptation and Munden’s extravagant execution. In interviews, Thorne is adamant about correcting the widespread view that Golding’s allegory concerns essential human savagery. And yet as Golding has said so many times:

I think, quite simply, that [the boys] don’t understand what beasts there are in the human psyche which have to be curbed. They’re too young to look ahead and really put the curbs on their own nature and implement them, because giving way to these beasts is always a pleasure, in some ways, and so their society breaks down. Of course, on the other hand, in an adult society it is possible society will not break down. It may be that we can put sufficient curbs on our own natures to prevent it from breaking down.

Of course, the matter is complicated by Golding’s specific and well-known inspirations for writing the novel. Goldman claimed his bleak tale of kids gone primitive was inspired by his own harsh World War II experience — he was a Royal Navy officer who participated in the Normandy landing on D-Day. Traumatized by the war and left with no hopeful sense of a cure for “the terrible disease of being human” or the always likely collapse of “civilization,” Goldman was aiming at a realistic portrait of how British children cut off from adult supervision would cope in the harsh state of nature on their own.

The professed realism of Lord of the Flies was later challenged by critics familiar with the actual case of the “Tongan castaways,” six shipwrecked teenagers from Tonga who washed up on a remote island in 1965, set up a peaceful and practical communal way of life, and were all rescued, homesick but healthy, fifteen months later. But it should be noted that with Lord of the Flies, Goldman was also attempting to counter what he regarded as widespread, ideologically addled narratives such as The Coral Island: A Tale of the South Pacific (1857), a children’s adventure novel that suggested that a group of British kids, cast away, would inevitably establish a lawful, rationally ordered Christian democracy reflecting the civilizing influences of British colonizing efforts.

Rightly scoffing at any such likelihood, Golding wrote Lord of the Flies in response, suggesting that a specific British savagery piled on top of essential human savagery adds up to the hellish Lord of the Flies scenario.

But Thorne is having none of Golding’s essentializing:

This is not about who we are when we’re at our essence. . . .  It’s about a group of kids that come with a culture and a socialization that they then reenact on the island. They are products of their parents.

Doing a bit of his own essentializing, Thorne uses flashbacks to draw a direct line from abbreviated scenes of the boys’ home lives and parents — or lack of parents — to the boys’ behavior on the island. And Thorne is all in with his concern for boys in particular, expressed in both Adolescence and Lord of the Flies: “The two do sit in a similar bracket in terms of trying to capture how difficult it is to be a boy, how complicated it is to be a boy, which is something that will always fascinate me,” Thorne says.

Thorne’s emphasis on the difficulties boys face seems grounded in a concern that they specifically are neglected or even disparaged in our culture: “I find it very troubling that you cannot talk about masculinity anymore without talking about toxic masculinity,” Thorne says. “It’s like the word ‘toxic’ is now continually applied to the front of it.”

Children in general face daunting challenges and need all the help available to negotiate a secure path to adulthood, if such a thing exists in these times. And historically, as we know perfectly well, boys’ needs have been heavily emphasized over girls, which is how societal attempts to address the imbalance came about in the first place. Addressing the perils girls face growing up must naturally include the structures of “toxic masculinity” that are strongly established in our society. The “manosphere,” anyone? Nobody named in the Jeffrey Epstein files brought to justice?

That doesn’t mean neglecting the needs of boys, but to the Thornes of the world, there’s never enough sympathy for what boys go through in a society full of imperfect parents and confusing social roles and, it seems, girls getting too much attention. Thorne himself tells poignant tales of his own misery as a lonely boy who identified so strongly with the equally lonely boy Elliott in Steven Spielberg’s E.T., that, grown-up Thorne asserts earnestly, “E.T. changed my life.” Thorne has a tattoo on his wrist of E. T.’s parting words to Elliott: “Be Good.” Which is so pitiful a directive to hold onto for life, I feel a bit sorry for him.

Thorne sums up his critique of what he sees as the currently wrongheaded approach to boys and men by deploring how we’ve ceased to believe that “masculinity is a prism and we need all the colors of that prism.”

Do we, though? Seems to me that embracing “all the colors” has involved, historically, a lot of bloodred shades associated with brutal violence, as seen in the gaudy jungle palette of Lord of the Flies. Of course, it depends on what exactly Thorne means by “the prism” and “the colors.” So if you watch this series — and I can’t really recommend it with any enthusiasm — there’s a lot to ponder as far as what exactly Thorne and Munden are trying to get across in adapting William Golding’s schoolhouse classic.

Looking at the world today, Golding’s fundamental allegory seems pretty spot on.