It is a truth universally acknowledged that the personal should never be allowed to get tangled up with the professional. In Pan, which tells the back-story to the Peter Pan fantasy, the line that separates the two runs thin on the ground for director Joe Wright. His parents founded a puppet theatre when he was young, and the otherwise gifted director appears to have seen the Pan project as a vehicle to return to the fantasy of his childhood years. Wright is also on record as having said that he was making this film for his four-year-old son (and Pandit Ravi Shankar’s grandson) Zubin.
There may, of course, be other reasons to account for why Pan is a crashing bore of a film, but to my mind at least some of it goes back to Wright’s blurring of this lakshman rekha. What it appears to have done is to cloud his otherwise impeccable directorial sensibility, which has won him critical and popular acclaim elsewhere. It’s also blinded him in inexplicable ways: How could he, for instance, have not realised that entire sections of the movie bear more than a fleeting resemblance to Avatar — and that some sequences seem like unabashed lifts from that other film about a Lost World (called, ahem, ‘Pan’dora!) being pillaged for a precious natural resource by an evil force?
And curiously, for someone with a halfway-decent screenplay and an adorable lead actor (Levi Miller as Peter Pan), Wright relies excessively on CGI to bamboozle viewers. A story that has magic at its core feels like the crazed output of a special effects geek on steroids. Much of the long-drawn climax sequence is a blur of largely incomprehensible activity masquerading as action.
In the end, what we’re left with is an overlong, tedious narrative about Peter Pan’s rite of passage as the ‘Chosen One’ who will claim his legacy and go on to vanquish the pirate Blackbeard. It’s enough to ruin the Peter Pan fantasy for me.
Emerging from watching Pan, however, one question leaps to mind: Why, Hugh Jackman, why? We know that even the best of actors will occasionally want to walk on the goofy side, taking on over-the-top characters, perhaps the better the explore (and showcase) the breadth of their oeuvre. But did high-steppin’ Hugh have to stoop so low, prancing to Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and in every other way making a complete dunce of himself? I’ll never be able to suppress a snort the next time he unfurls his Wolverine blades, after having seen him with his weird beehive hair-do and his histrionic excesses as Blackbeard.
