Hello All,
So, I forgot that Pan was coming out this week when I went in to work and found out it was playing just as my shift ended, so on a whim I decided to check it out. How does the reimagined origin of Peter Pan…..pan out, I guess.
Plot Summary - Peter (Levi Miller) is a orphaned london boy living through the war, when one day he’s snatched up by pirates and taken to neverland to mine for Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman). After escaping with the help of Hook (Garrett Hedlund), they find the natives who are at war with the pirates and the tribe chief’s daughter Tiger Lily (Rooney Mara). Together they must stop Blackbeard and save neverland.
Pros - For his first major role in a movie Levi Miller is actually pretty great in this. He knows to capture an emotion and hold your attention and I can honestly see a really bright future in acting ahead of him.
Cons - Oh boy this is going to be a long one.
First off, the story is trying way to hard to have Hook be like Indiana Jones, going so far as to even have him dress like Jones, even though his story line and his love story with Rooney Mara’s Tiger Lily comes off as a bad ripoff of the love story of Han Solo and Princess Leia. Also, wasn’t Tiger Lily originally a child? Yeah they made her an adult in this but it’s still super fucking creepy. Not to mention Rooney Mara looks bored the whole time no matter what she’s doing. Her character design is questionable too, where she’s basically what look like ugly throw rugs that have been cut up to make ugly dresses and headdresses. Seriously it looks like a rug exploded on her head. Finally, Hugh Jackman as Blackbeard is trying, but my god it’s hard to take him seriously when he’s dressed like a goddamn foppish chicken. Seriously every outfit he’s in makes him look like a giant chicken, if it’s supposed to be symbolic it’s certainly doesn’t work.
Speaking of design, almost everything about Neverland looks as bland and fake as you can get. There’s one scene where Hook has to fight a native warrior, and the warrior does this thing where, it’s hard to describe, but he’s supposed to be hanging by his feet from a pole horizontally and it looks fake as shit. Almost everything about this film looks bad with the only exception maybe being the never birds who are basically skeletons, but even then if you think about it it’s just a visual pun. The kingdom of the fairies looks like a miserable place, and Tinkerbell who's in the film for all of five seconds, looks like a bad cgi glass figurine.
There are also some other baffling choices in other parts of the film as well. Three times in this film people sing, not like musical sing more like chanting, but out of the three songs, two I can confirm are Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana and Blitzkrieg Bop by The Ramones…..in 1945…..Why?! The seem so out of place that it took me out of the film completely. Who thought that Nirvana and The Ramones would be good pirate songs? and then we don’t hear anymore singing after like the first thirty minutes of the movie, so why even have them do it in the first place and why with those songs?
The way people die is odd too, and kindly off weirdly off balance in terms of portrayal. At one point Blackbeard literally throws a kid off of his ship which is hovering over the deepest part of the mine. We don’t see him hit the ground but we never see him again in the movie. Also, Tiger Lily’s axe can be seen hitting a pirate’s back, causing him to fall and hit the ground, we never see him again. Yet when (Spoiler Alert but trust me who cares?) when Blackbeard raids the native village, when the Natives die they turn into coloured powder. Peter even watches the chief die and the next time we see him he has the chief’s powder on his face (wow that sounds even worse than it did in my head.) You’re basically showing him wearing the blood on his face why not just make it actual blood, it wouldn’t look any more real than anything else in this movie.
The plot is barely worth mentioning because it’s every generic fantasy plot you’ve seen before. There’s a prophecy, the chosen one doesn’t believe even though everyone else does, he eventually finds the courage to realize his destiny and save the day. He even really doesn’t do much in the end, all Peter does is just direct the fairies to attack Blackbeard and his crew while Tiger Lily does 99% of the work and Hook kills one guy and crashes and ship. They even didn’t really need Peter there they made Peter Pan pointless in a PETER PAN MOVIE! How did you even manage to do that?
Final Score - 1/10
As an early showcase of a potentially great child actor, this is all it’s worth. For anything else, skip it. I can only imagine parents of really young children might see this, but when they inevitably tell there kids the original Peter Pan story I think they’ll end up forgetting this one.
I will still probably do a review of Hyena Road just don’t know when yet.
Until then, I’ll see you folks at the movies.
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