A few months ago, a movie came out called Fant4stic. I saw it and was baffled by it. It’s not very often that I see something in which every single decision that the filmmakers make seems to be utterly crazy and destructive to the movie itself. Fant4stic was bad because not a single choice was the correct one.
Then there’s a movie like Pan. Pan is also a very, very confusing movie. But when I watched Pan, I got the sense that every decision was made for a very specific reason. The creative team behind this had a vision and they executed that vision. The problem might be that the resulting film is something so beyond my comprehension that it’s almost a surrealist masterpiece.
Let’s knock out the basics first. Pan is the origin story of Peter Pan, and just typing that sentence out fills me with an unholy rage. Why does Peter Pan need an origin story? Why does any well known and established character need an origin story at this point? I thought we collectively agreed, after the failure of the Star Wars prequels, that origin stories were unnecessary and can go so far as to ruin the characters as they exist in the original stories. Ugh. Fuck.
Ok, got off track there. In Pan, Peter (Levi Miller) is an orphan who is kidnapped by the pirate Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman), brought to Neverland, and learns that he is the prophesied savior who will unite the Native Tribes with the Fairy Kingdom to overthrow Blackbeard’s rule. Here’s another problem. Why the hell does Peter Pan have to be the subject of a prophesy? It’s so fucking unnecessary! Like, I can’t even right now. Just watch this quick video. It pretty much sums up all the problems with the goddamned predestined hero thing.
Wow, seriously, gotta get back to it. I said at the beginning that so much of this movie is utterly confounding, and the first moment of that occurs right as Peter is brought into Blackbeard’s base of operations. Blackbeard leads his army of pirates and captured orphans in an acapella rendition of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” What!? They justify this somewhat by saying something about Neverland being an island outside of time, but this shit is so out of left field that its mind boggling. And then, five minutes later, they so the same thing with “Blitzkrieg Bop”! Pop songs aren’t a staple of the film’s score at any other point in this movie. These are the only times that modern stuff is played, or, uh, sang. Sweet Jesus, it’s so weird.
The other really strange thing that just doesn’t fit into the world of Neverland is that Tiger Lily (Rooney Mara) is wearing Doc Martins. Doc Freaking Martins!!! She’s a native living in the woods of a magical floating island. Where the fuck did she get a pair of boots from the 1990s? Don’t believe me? Here, look at this shit!
WHY?!?!
Ok, I’ll admit, that is probably a pretty petty gripe. Let’s just do a lightning round of some of the other craziness:
>Hudlund is doing his best growly voiced, Scott Glenn impression…for reasons, I guess?
>The Fairy Kingdom looks exactly like the Fortress of Solitude from Superman The Movie.
>Why does Cara Delevingne show up for twenty seconds in a non-speaking role? Isn’t she bigger than that by now?
>Further, why does Amanda Seyfried show up for one minute and deliver, like, one line? Shes defiantly bigger than that.
>The Natives are all different races, which is probably a lot better than the Washington Redskins level of racism in the animated Disney movie.
Nope. Nothing uncomfortable about this.
The thing about Pan is that it could have been a good enough childrens movie. Its bright and colorful and swashbuckling and there’s some fun stuff going on. The issues come down to the pockets of outright lunacy and the fact that this is just a story that doesn’t need to exist. By making Peter both a messianic figure and the leader of a rebellion, it takes away from the fact that he is an avatar of innocence. He is supposed to be the eternal child who is forced to grow up, but by giving him this history and destiny, it subtracts massively from what his character will become. Basically what I’m saying is that you can’t fight a war and be an unsullied kid at the same time.
Pan isn’t a horrible movie. It’s not the worst movie of the year or the worst Peter Pan movie.* It just doesn’t work. It has so many big ideas and wants to do so much, but those disparate pieces don’t come together to form a united whole. Its an interesting and valiant effort, but in the end it’s simply a weird, disjointed, and unnecessary picture.
Still better than Fant4stic though.
*The worst Peter Pan movie is Hook. Come at me, scrubs!
