Pan tells the
story of a young boy named Peter’s search for his family. I think. It is set
mainly in Neverland with an established landscape, familiar characters and a
fairly patent premise; yet it left me with a profound sense of confusion. Pan is a fantasy, a spectacle, an
adventure, but mainly a muddle. Rather than looking to the original story and
using contemporary successes for inspiration to create something fresh, Pan seems to mash a bunch of elements
together haphazardly, losing all the merits of the myriad source materials in
the process.
The story begins with an eerie echo of The Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. Peter
Pan’s traditional world of Victorian England is updated to World War II,
perhaps in order to include airplanes, bombings and a general air of temporally
inconsistent senselessness which sets the scene for the rest of the film. Here
we meet Peter Pan, a rebellious orphan with a pervasive fear of heights. Pirates
wearing copious amounts of makeup á la Pirates
of the Caribbean follow shortly on the heels of gluttonous nuns, and before
you can say “What the shit?” we are in Neverland, where things actually make
less sense.
Enter Blackbeard (think Hook, without the hook), who bears little resemblance to the
historical person or fictional incarnations of Edward Teach. (Would it really
have been that hard to come up with a new pirate name? Captain Gristle. Done.
And there are no expectations of character or story to live up to.) Using rock anthems
of counter-culture decontextualized and diminished into the chants of child
labourers, Blackbeard runs a fairy dust mine and kidnaps orphans to provide
slave labour. It is worth noting that the real Blackbeard actually freed the slaves
from La Concorde, and was never known
to have harmed any of his captives or hostages. Just saying. Captain Gristle on
the other hand…
One of the downtrodden orphan slaves that Peter meets is
James Hook (also without the hook): no longer an Eton-educated, devious, swashbuckling former boatswain to
Blackbeard, but a gruff, tough (effing gorgeous), young American bent on escape
from the mines and from Neverland. He reminded me of Indiana Jones more than
anything. His love interest is a lamentably whitewashed Tigerlily, princess of
a multiracial tribe of people who seem to be made of coloured dust.
Of course, everyone
in Neverland has been waiting for the chosen child to fulfill a fairy prophesy.
Do you suppose it could be Peter Pan? This now-hackneyed plot device was put to
better use in Willow, The Neverending Story, and Harry Potter.
What you end up with is a plucky WWII-era orphan boy
prophesied to bring about the downfall of evil; a brusque, reluctant 1950s
style hero; a tyrannical 18th century pirate; and a warrior princess
all following their patented storylines toward an inevitable conclusion. I get
that Neverland is a magical place where time does not seem to matter, but the
anachronisms were simply too much to figure.
What I love most about J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy is the sense of dark foreboding that underlies the
innocent games of childhood. I do admire the ambition of Pan’s filmmakers in attempting an origin story of Barrie’s
eponymous hero. Pan had spirit, but
something about it just didn’t fly; instead it floated with no sense of
direction. Maybe if the filmmakers had referred to the original work, it would have
given Pan some much needed gravity.
I give this a bar mat shot: the
dregs of everything that should be good thrown together in a glass and called a
drink. At least it’s boozy.
Cheers,
Em
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