Pan

Pan [2015] is the latest adaption of the Peter Pan story, this time around directed by Joe Wright and stars Levi Miller as the title role with Garrett Hedlund and Hugh Jackman playing Captain Hook and Blackbeard respectively. The film follows a young Peter as he’s whisked away from home and into Neverland and he becomes the titular leader of the lost boys.

Artificial and appalling. Never in my life have I seen a film that looks so artificial and contrived of reality.  The entirety of Pan is shoot on a green screen and while some films can use that technology to their advantage pretty effectively (Avatar, The Avengers), it is not the case here. Every single shot in the film is littered with horrible placed and terribly rendered CGI creations that create no sense of awe for the audience. Add that to the already ridiculous (or should I say nonexistent) physics of this world, and the sense of reality that was previously established to draw us into the story, is completely gone, thus making the story and the film as a whole utterly pointless.

It’s not the 1940’s anymore. Every single actor in the film brings forth some of the worst performances of their careers here; from Rooney Mara all the way to Hugh Jackman. The latter of which has hit a career low after his terrible performance here and his shockingly god-awful performance from Chappie early this year. Garret Hedlund is typically a pretty decent actor, but you wouldn’t know that from this film where for the entirety of the film, he speaks in old, over the top, film-noir dialect. I have no clue if this was an actor’s choice or not. Either way, it makes a supposedly menacing and badass character seem like a complete imbecile instead. Young Levi Miller is extremely bland, which is not necessarily a bad thing when contrasted against everyone else in the film but is still a forgettable performance none-the-less.

Amounting to nothing. Pan’s screenplay is so generic and benign of creativity it’s incredible that this was the script Warner Brothers decided to throw 150 million dollars at. You would think that a prequel to the famous children’s tale would tell us the story of how Peter Pan became Peter Pan, but you would be incorrect about that. The film kind of just ambles along until the very end where everything should come to a head and lead into the story that we all know by heart. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. It takes the route that Ridley Scott took with 2012’s Prometheus where questions get unanswered and nothing ties together and absolutely nothing makes sense. Then the film concludes with a slight cliffhanger and the promise that they’ll be back just so they have an excuse to make another one.

A disaster of monumental proportions. Pan is an absolute disaster of a film. The feeling that the film should be harnessing is one of adventure, awe, and wonderment. Instead, we get a horribly acted, void of any creativity, half-baked, unsatisfying and wildly forgettable adaptation of the already overdone fantasy story.