The news that someone is making a Peter Pan origin story inspires several questions. Such as: Why? Isn’t the murkiness of Peter’s origins part of the charm of the classic tales?

And then: What about Wendy? There’s a reason the full title of J.M. Barrie’s 1911 novel, his fullest rendering of the Pan story, was “Peter and Wendy.” An eternal child without a mother figure is just a spoiled brat.

But no one listens, so here we have “Neverland,” a four-hour, two-night miniseries beginning Sunday on Syfy, and what a thudding, literal-minded bore it is. A prequel to the classic Peter Pan stories, it sets out to explain how Peter and the Lost Boys came to live in Neverland, before the arrival of Wendy Darling and her brothers.

The first of many odd choices is the decision to locate Neverland elsewhere in the galaxy, on its own planet. Travel to and from is accomplished not by flying, but by striking a magic orb discovered by an Elizabethan alchemist. (If you’re counting, that’s another odd choice.) Simply being in the vicinity when an orb is struck or dropped can zap you through space, which accounts for the presence of Neverland’s pirate crews and American Indian tribes.

Working from this premise, the writer and director, Nick Willing, builds a story out of secondhand parts. Peter belongs to a gang of young London pickpockets (“Oliver Twist”) who are accidentally sent to Neverland and become characters in an ecological-imperialist allegory involving rapacious European pirates, noble Indians and a precious natural resource (“Avatar”).

“Neverland” was partly shot on location in Ireland but more often has the airless, artificial look of the green screen and the empty soundstage. Occasionally the animators and computer-graphics technicians supply a nice image.

The cast includes Rhys Ifans as a somber Hook, Anna Friel as a sexy pirate captain, Keira Knightley as the voice of a butch Tinker Bell, and Bob Hoskins, again, as Smee (a role he first played in Steven Spielberg’s “Hook” in 1991).

Charlie Rowe is a capable, if not very interesting, Peter. Most deserving of sympathy is Q’orianka Kilcher (“The New World,” “Princess Kaiulani”). The attraction of Aaya, played by the 21-year-old Kilcher, to Peter, played by the 15-year-old Rowe, is more unsettling on screen than in the pages of a Victorian fantasy, and there are other aspects of “Neverland” that may give pause to parents of small children.

What they should really be upset about, though, is that the magical story they remember about the boy who refused to grow up has been brand-extended into a pedestrian science-fiction action film and padded out to four hours.

‘NEVERLAND’

Syfy, Sunday and Monday nights at 9