Peter Pan Grows Up In Joe Wright’s Dark And Over-The-Top ‘Pan’

If Steven Spielberg’s Hook was a Peter Pan movie about growing up, then Joe Wright’s Pan is, ostensibly, a Peter Pan movie about death. (Peter Pan movies about Peter Pan, on the other hand, are rare as hen’s teeth; P.J. Hogan’s sumptuous 2003 Peter Pan grows in stature with each passing year.)

This is not surprising when you consider Peter himself –faced with certain death in Peter And Wendy, the flying boy shrugs, “To die will be an awfully big adventure”, a sentiment echoed by a key character in Pan in one of many winking references. But it’s a theme that faces an uphill battle in a children’s cinema landscape that has long since been stripped of danger or darkness.

Disappointingly, the film’s bracing darker streak also battles internally with its own capitulation to dull and bog standard “inspirational” Hollywood rhetoric, but like the pixie dust Pan’s pirates mine, there’s still some magic buried here.

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The Lost Boy

Pan is, more or less, a prequel to Peter And Wendy, and begins with the delivery by a desperate mother (Amanda Seyfried) of a baby boy at a London orphanage. Time moves swiftly, and Peter (Levi Miller) is now a young lad at odds with the cruel nun Mother Barnabas (Kathy Burke), a rations-stealing villain that even Dickens might have thought a touch too broad.

This Pan story is set not in the pre-World War I milieu that most Peter Pan productions inhabit, but rather London during the Blitz. It’s during one nighttime raid that Peter discovers a letter from his mother, in which she promises they’ll meet again, “in this world, or another”.

It turns out Barnabas’ cruelty extends to selling off orphans to a band of pirates, who steal the kids during the night and transport them to Neverland, where they are to work for the nefarious pirate Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman), mining pixie dust.

It’s in the mines that Peter meets Smee (Adeel Akhtar), and more importantly, James Hook (Garrett Hedlund), who hatches an escape plan after it becomes clear that Peter — tossed off the plank with a bored “think a happy thought” by Blackbeard — can fly.

This leads the trio to the home of ‘The Natives’ (replacing the core text’s Piccaninnies), where the Chief (Jack Charles) announces that Peter, with his pan-flute necklace charm, is the chosen one. He is, as Tiger Lily (Rooney Mara) portentously announces, “our tribe’s bravest warrior”. To find out, they must journey to the Fairy Kingdom, the home of Peter’s late fairy father, a prince.

From there, it’s full steam ahead through Mermaid Lagoon, pursued by Blackbeard, towards the fairy kingdom and beyond.

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A Hot Neverland Mess

You can’t accuse Pan of understatement. From its masses of child labourers barking Smells Like Teen Spirit and Blitzkrieg Bop to The Natives’ Oxfam Shop hometown covered in pom-poms and fairy lights, Nonso Anozie’s metal-fisted pirate Bishop to Huge Act Man’s Brian Blessed-esque performance as Blackbeard, Wright has thrown a lot at the wall here. Not all of it sticks, but a lot of it is ridiculous fun.

There are also moments of quiet beauty, like Peter’s first journey through space and time, and the great schools of glittering flying fish that whip through Neverland’s forests, as well as some striking animated sequences (a wood-cut demonstration of Blackbeard’s battle with the fairies, and another that expands that tale, in which masses of bubbles fight with whorls of smoke). But for the most part, Pan is so hell-for-leather that it makes Hook look restrained. It’s hard not to admire its commitment to the over-the-top. Hedlund’s performance as Hook is so bizarre he might as well have walked in off the set of Jupiter Ascending.

Much was made of Mara’s casting as Tiger Lily, traditionally a Native American princess in every other adaptation of the story. Here, she’s just one of ‘The Natives’ –a ‘tribe’ of Neverland’s first people that includes many ethnicities– and, to her credit, Mara provides one of the film’s stillest performances as the steely warrior. In turning Tiger Lily into a generic warrior, though, the film falls prey to the great lie of “the best actress for the part”; if she’s just another Native, why did she have to be white?

Indeed, she appears to be the only white person in the Tribe, and while it’s wonderful to see so many diverse faces on screen, they are — with the exception of Charles’ Chief, and a warrior played by South Korean action star Na Tae-joo — quite literally only faces; extras there to provide an authentic sense of diversity. (Blackbeards pirates, and Peter’s lost boys, fare better.) This has the unfortunate effect – -given her pink face paint and “boho” outfit — of making Mara seem like a Carefree White Girl off to find herself on an Eat, Pray, Love journey of cultural appropriation. This Tiger Lily would definitely call Tinkerbell her “spirit animal”.

And on the topic of Tink, in this retelling pixie dust doesn’t just make ships fly, it can also be smoked (like opium) in order to “rejuvenate” oneself. The Aristocrats!

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Peter Pan Grows Up

Death is everywhere in Pan. A child of no more than ten walks the plank and plummets (off screen) to his death. Peter deals with the loss of his mother. Hook tells his young charge that “there’s a fine line between bravery and suicide, kid”. Natives, shot by pirates, explode into puffs of Holi-esque coloured powder, a Technicolour take on Spielberg’s War Of The Worlds (and, in turn, a 9/11 riff). And Blackbeard first greets Peter with an anecdote about deep, dream-filled sleep: “It’s death,” he tells the frightened child, “murmuring for you.”

This speaks to what the theatre critic Lyn Gardner said of Peter Pan’s “dark core”: “We should stop wrapping it in a hazy gauze of nostalgia and acknowledge that Peter Pan is not just a work of genius, but a work of genuine horror.”

Similarly, for its first two thirds, the film actively rejects the ‘every child is a winner’ template that risk-free family filmmaking has served up for decades. After catching him red-handed, Barnabas snorts of Peter that “He’s not special– not even ‘in his own way’.” At that point I could have set fire to a participation ribbon and crowed around the cinema.

These moments in the film tell children they might very well fail, if in fact they don’t die. It’s as the Brothers Grimm and Sigmund Freud would have wanted it, and not a surprise, given Wright’s Hanna was a very dark fairy tale disguised as an action thriller.

Not only that, but Peter and his orphan cohorts are little shits; Pan is the first film in years to depict children as children, not as oddly poised mini adults (think Chloe Moretz and the Fannings). They recall the kids of Spielberg’s golden era (Jaws, Close Encounters, E.T.): tearaway ratbags who swear and hit each other and cry a lot.

What a pity, then, that by the time the film’s final stretch kicks off, Peter is regularly fed stock standard dribble about just being the best he can be, that “home’s not where you come from, it’s where you make it”, and that it doesn’t matter if he fails. Doesn’t it? I thought the fate of an entire civilisation was riding on it.

Oh well, I guess every Peter Pan adaptation is a winner in its own special way.

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Pan is in cinemas September 24.

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Clem Bastow is an award-winning writer and critic with a focus on popular culture, gender politics, mental health, and weird internet humour. She has sat in each of the Back To The Future trilogy Deloreans, but can’t drive. She’s on Twitter at @clembastow