Pan stands in the very long, very intimidating shadow of really great Peter Pan adaptations. Inevitably this “new take” on the story from director Joe Wright will be measured against Steven Spielberg’s Hook (Robin Williams as the, yes, grown-up flying boy pitted against Dustin Hoffman’s devilish, aged Captain Hook). Pan and Hook both set their stories outside the timeline of J.M. Barrie’s original, and both rely on colorful, childish, ridiculous fun to give the movies energy.
But where Hook balances its whimsy with the weight of Barrie’s mortal themes, Pan does away with seriousness in any form, leaving us with a steampunk fantasy more concerned with cartoonish crocodiles, Nirvana references, and flying everything than with its source material. Aside from scattered references to canonical terms like Lost Boy and happy thoughts, and a few nods to other adaptations (there’s even a quip about “bad form” for Hook fans), this movie is disconnected from all established notions about Peter Pan stories.
The story moves forward to WWII during the Blitz solely for the spectacle of RAF planes shooting at a flying pirate ship. The ship in question has been kidnapping young boys from a church-run orphanage. Peter (12-year-old Levi Miller, who gives the movie’s best performance) investigates these disappearances and discovers that the nuns, who are horrible anyway, are in collusion with the pirates. In one bungee cord-powered raid, the pirates take the entire orphanage aboard.
Much of the movie was choreographed for 3D, so if you’re prone to motion sickness, beware. The ensuing flight sequence sends the huge ship spiraling through London, dodging blimps, and rocketing straight upwards into space to actually sail to the second star to the right. Upon reaching the floating island of Neverland, the ship moors above a massive mining operation where the boys are to be enslaved.
To the film’s credit, if there was an Oscar for Best Entrance Of The Year, Hugh Jackman would have it in the bag. Captain Blackbeard (don’t ask me why, I don’t know) saunters out of his cabin dressed to the nines in a black velvet doublet straight out of Shakespeare. He leaps up to the railing of his floating ship, throws his arms out, and screams along with his labor-based utopia to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” booming from the pit below.
Implicit time travel aside, this was the moment I knew exactly what I had gotten into: a ridiculous, outrageous, no-holds-barred joyride without regard for realism or tradition and dedicated wholly to unadulterated (and un-adult-like) fun. It’s like getting on a questionably constructed rollercoaster: after a certain point you’re locked in and can’t get off, so you might as well throw your hands up and enjoy the thrilling, if rickety, ride.
To simplify the convoluted plot as much as possible, Peter is nearly executed by walking off a plank into the deep abyss of the mine, but is saved when he flies at the bottom. Blackbeard confides to him a prophecy about a flying boy, the son of a human and a fairy, who would overthrow Blackbeard’s empire and restore Neverland to its rightful inhabitants, the fairies. An escape, chase sequence, bonding moment, and poorly animated Neverbird attack later, Peter and his newfound friends, fellow slaves James Hook (Garret Hedlund) and Sam Smiegel, or Smee (Adeel Akhtar), are captured by the natives. (It should also be mentioned that Hook, in this version, is a cowboy. Not really sure how that happened.)
There was a lot of concern when Rooney Mara was cast as Tiger Lily that Neverland’s Indians were going to be white. But the film plays out the concept of natives on Neverland as literally as possible: these people, who are multiracial and multicultural, are presented as actual natives of Neverland, not the Native American Indians typical of Peter Pan stories. Viewers can make of that bait-and-switch what they will.
Tiger Lily affirms Peter’s role as the Pan, the prophesied hero who would take down Blackbeard. It’s rough around the edges, but Peter’s response to his chosen-ness amounts to a truer heroism than the special snowflake brand this kind of plot creates. He doubts his abilities but resolves to fight anyway because it’s his moral duty.
The only other vague attempt at deeper meaning from the movie is the very sinister re-contextualizing of “think a happy thought.” Blackbeard taunts his victims with this phrase just before he tries to kill them. It’s the last thing he tells Peter before shoving him off into the fall that first causes Peter to fly, so maybe that’s how the film seeks to tie it into its classic use. Clearly, it’s not trying very hard. It’s not really supposed to.
Not everyone is going to be able to get over the film’s many technical flaws, or even allow for the sheer ridiculousness that is the film’s only real strength. But the movie’s true audience, the viewers it most cares about, are kids, and kids don’t worry about canned dialogue, bad CGI, and clichéd plot twists. They love flying ships, glowing mermaids, trampoline-based combat, and boys who fly and talk to fairies. And Pan over-delivers in all of those categories.
Caveat Spectator
Peter makes a joke about a nun’s “bum,” and from there the worst word uttered is “darned” (very obviously dubbed over its harsher alternative). Peter and another boy are punished for their snooping by having their hands whipped with a rod, but the action isn’t shown. Peter puts up the British version of the middle finger at one point. A character breathes in fairy dust from a machine in a way very obviously meant to evoke drug abuse. When the natives are killed they burst in clouds of Technicolor dust, which isn’t as violent, but makes their deaths very unambiguous. The fate of a boy shoved off a plank suspended over a deep pit is undetermined, and we see a character bloodlessly executed. Pirates do pirate-y things, and there’s generally a lot of peril and violence, including falls, chases, swordfights, shoot-outs, flamethrowers, and flying crocodiles.
Jessica Gibson is a former intern with Christianity Today Movies and a student at The King’s College in New York City. She tweets only to fangirl and gripe @GibbyTOD.
