Pan (Joe Wright, 2015)

Joe Wright’s Pan (2015) certainly has enjoyable value. It has a colourful and sometimes surreal visual style. The actors are entertaining – especially Hugh Jackman as the sophisticated and vicious yet oddly occasionally sympathetic villain Blackbeard, and the child actor Levi Miller puts real effort into his portrayal of the protagonist Peter. However, it is not without its share of plot holes, particularly surrounding the villain’s plan conflicting with his motivation, and implications of the story, sometimes thought-provoking but other times head-scratching.

Much of cinema in the 21^st century comprises heavily of reboots of, and prequels to, existing fictional universes. This leads to arguments regarding a lack of originality in Hollywood, yet ironically audiences are drawn to these so-called “reimagining” of stories they are familiar with. Audiences nonetheless have expectations for reboots, for the film to be faithful to its source material, and these standards even apply to prequels of the filmmakers’ own invention.

Take for example Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful (2013). Let’s give credit where it’s due – effort was put into the world of Oz to make it the as similar as possible to the original setting while introducing some fittingly surreal elements of its own conception. It was self-contained, filling in enough of the blanks to portray a relatively complete prequel to Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939). However, the prequel has no musical numbers, and in other instances doesn’t quite match the tone of the timeless classic. The Wizard of Oz is, by definition, a musical, and yet James Franco’s too-cool-for-school postmodern character flat out stops the Munchkins in their tracks as they begin to perform a song. If a film is made to extend the universe of a preexisting text such as a film or a book, it must be made in the same spirit as its source material.

Pan is presented as a prequel, an origin story for Peter Pan, and while it includes certain story elements from Peter Pan lore, it does not qualify as a faithful adaptation. The film is an origin story for Peter Pan’s arrival in Neverland and gaining his powers of flight, but none of the characters develop to the point of their relationships or personalities in the book, and so it fails both as an adaptation and as a prequel.

Tinker Bell, a chief character in J. M. Barrie’s novel and Peter Pan’s faithful sidekick/pseudo-love interest, is featured for all of twelve seconds and is never seen again. A major part of Peter Pan’s character is that he hates ‘grown-ups’ and the prospect of growing up, but the representation of the character in Pan is given no buildup to, reason for or even the presence of this important characteristic outside of Hook’s one line of dialogue, relatively early on in the film, where he expresses a pessimistic attitude towards adulthood. Captain Hook is replaced with another character altogether, essentially representing him as Han Solo in a cowboy hat. The film is advertised as having Peter and Hook meeting each other in Neverland and becoming allies, which would imply that their relationship would develop to their becoming friends-turned-enemies. But no such development happens. Peter never takes Hook’s hand and feeds it to the crocodile, Hook and Smee don’t enter their partnership as pirates – in fact Hook doesn’t become a pirate at all outside of attaining a ship. Instead they jokingly hint that Peter and Hook will become enemies in the future, but it’s hard to imagine this iteration of Hook becoming so obsessive and vengeful that he would dedicate his life to killing Peter Pan when at the end they’re the best of friends.

On the surface, Pan is an entertaining and nice-looking film, but it did not deliver the correct characterisation to its lead roles and as a result did not lead up to the setting of the well-known story. Because the characters of the beloved classic story have little to no presence in this prequel, relying on potentially nonexistent sequels to set up the story for that of the book or another adaptation of such, it fails as a self-contained story and a faithful adaptation.