Pan

When it was first announced that Joe Wright, the director of Atonement and Hanna, was going to make a Peter Pan film I was immediately on board. I knew that, if nothing else, we would get an inventive and original take on the Peter Pan story and that we certainly did. With Pirate ships flying through the air and easily the most imaginative rendering of Neverland I have ever seen, this is a Peter Pan story unlike any other. 

The film opens with Peter (played by Levi Miller) being dropped off at a London Orphanage by his mother, with a letter and a pan flute styled medallion. We jump ahead 12 years to the middle of World War II London (an interesting change from the usual Victorian London setting of prior incarnations) and find Peter is still at the same orphanage. Rebellious and ever a thorn in the orphanage's Mother Superior, Peter starts noticing kids are going missing in the middle of the night. Peter stays up one night and witnesses several other orphans being abducted in the middle of the night and in the process of escaping, Peter is taken as well. Hoisted onto a flying Pirate Ship and flown off to Neverland, Peter finds himself in the clutches of Blackbeard (played by Hugh Jackman). Blackbeard is employing hundreds and hundreds of orphans and other Lost Boys to mine for crystallized Fairy Dust which he regularly inhales to keep himself young and alive. 

Soon he crosses paths with another miner, James Hook (played by Garrett Hedlund), and the two conspire to escape the mines. The commandeer one of Blackbeard's ships and fly it deeper into Neverland before crash landing and running into a tribe of Neverland natives and Tiger Lily (played by Rooney Mara). Initially identified as Pirates, they two are given one chance to live by facing off against the tribe's best warrior, Kwahu (played by Tee-joo Na). If they survive, they can live. This leads to a fight between Hook and Kwahu that is easily one of the most inventive ones I've seen this side of Beyond Thunderdome (the entire fight arena is a giant trampoline). The fight is called off when Tiger Lily discovers Peter's pan flute medallion and realizes he's the prophesied savior that would lead the fight against Blackbeard to save Neverland and the Fairy Kingdom. 

There are a lot of things I really liked about Pan. It has a unique style all it's own, with a kaleidoscope of color and energy to match. This movie gets going right from the start and barely slows down, moving from one scene to the next at a hurried pace. Levi Miller is certainly charismatic and likeable as the would be Peter Pan. I really liked him in the role. Garrett Hedlund makes a great partner in crime for Peter as James Hook, with the two being best buds in the movie. Clearly, the set up is that they would fall out down the road in a sequel or two down the road. Hugh Jackman does the best he can with the rather underwritten role of Blackbeard. Jackman injects as much life as he can in the role, but aside from his singular desire for more fairy dust crystals, there really isn't a whole lot to his character, which is a shame. Rooney Mara does well as Tiger Lily, but at the same part doesn't quite stand out the way it should. She kicks plenty of butt and is suitably fierce, with decent chemistry with Hedlund, but yet didn't really knock my socks off. I'm not quite on board with the critcisms that she was miscast though as the Joe Wright made an intentional decision to re-imagine Tiger Lily and her tribe, steering away from the stereotypical Native American presentations in the past and come up with something completely new with a bunch of different nationalities represented. It's a bold decision that worked reasonably well for me, but I can see why it may not have for others. Still, I applaud Wright for at least attempting to sidestep the troubling portrayals of the past. 

The film has imagination to spare, with fun action sequences that include an aerial battle between fighter planes and flying pirate ship over London. There's also an interesting choice as we are first introduced to Blackbeard and the assorted miners when we hear the miners singing and it quickly becomes apparent they are in fact singing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Jackman's Blackbeard quickly joins in and the whole thing is so surreal that I still can't decide if it's brilliant or terrible, although I'm edging towards the former. A few scenes later, they are once again singing only this time it's The Ramones' "Blitzkreig Bop" but after that, the sing along curiously ends. However, the score by John Powell fills the gap nicely, giving the film a thrilling and sweeping score to match the candy colored visuals on screen. 

Pan hasn't gotten a lot of love from the critics and I admit it's not a perfect movie. It has a lot of style, but the story is largely still the typical hero's journey story we've seen countless time before. The knowing winks to what would come that the film makes were perhaps a little too on the nose. The special effects at times are not that convincing and we can obviously pick out the green screen shots, but at least they're inventive and unique. Nonetheless, I was able to appreciate it for what it was as an imaginative film, filled with lush visuals creating a fantasy world we haven't really seen before. I actually appreciated that this film tried to do something different, rather than tell the same Peter Pan story all over again, which would be pointless since director P.J Hogan already gave us the definitive live action rendition in 2003's Peter Pan. This isn't going to be a film for everyone, but if what I've written above hasn't scared you off yet, chances are you just might have a good time with it too.