When Joe Wright’s Pan moves its setting away from London and into Neverland, Peter (Levi Miller), not yet the hero we know he becomes, steps out onto the deck of a flying pirate ship to observe a strip mine jammed with filthy children singing a shanty song that sounds an awful lot like “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” That’s because it is “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” belted out with a forced resignation by the captive kiddies at the behest of vicious, cruel, equally filthy pirates. Not long after, Peter stands on the precipice of actual doom, and the crowd rumbles the lyrics to “Blitzkrieg Bop,” no longer a ditty about German battle tactics in World War II but instead a death march for lost boys who haven’t been lost long enough to earn the name.
No spoilers here: Peter doesn’t end up dying. Instead, he flies, and as he zips around, even though briefly, the anachronistic magic of our introduction to Wright’s Neverland dissipates. Pan isn’t as screwy and unconventional as its musical choices want us to think it is. In fact, it’s the very definition of “conventional,” a movie whose script is made up of bad Hollywood plot tropes rather than, you know, actual writing. Prequels; reboots; hero’s journey; destiny—Pan is the Batman Begins, or maybe the Star Wars prequels, among the current crop of recalibrated Disney classics. Except for when Wright injects a bit of the modern into J.M. Barrie’s antiquated fantasy, the film lacks a soul. It’s too busy trying to demystify the mystical things that make Peter Pan interesting in the first place.
In Pan, we meet Peter in his pre-Neverland life as an orphan, which by all accounts is pretty miserable. He’s stuck in an orphanage run by a brutish nun (Kathy Burke) at the onset of the Blitz, which probably explains why the Ramones show up on the soundtrack. If the booms and bombings weren’t bad enough, the nun happens to have an accord with a gang of pirates: They buy misbehaving boys off of her to use as slave labor, bungee jumping into the tots’ sleeping quarters and yanking them out of their beds in the dead of night. It’s a neat idea but it’s also where the film makes it first tonal mistake: Being kidnapped by men—even men who live free on the open seas—while you’re sleeping should be utterly terrifying, but Wright plays the sequence for laughs. He treats it like a cut-scene in a video game, one that’s buttressed by an extended chase in which RAF planes fly after a levitating pirate ship across the London skyline. (If this sounds awesome on paper, it’s remarkably stupid in practice.)
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