I respect that Chris Pine brings his good game to a children’s film with as much resolve and intentionality as he does his more serious adult roles. There were moments of his Hell or High Water type performance even in Wrinkle. Pine’s face graces the screen enough to almost erase Mindy Kaling’s awkward line deliveries and boxy gowned running scenes over CG grassy knolls to meet Oprah and Reese Witherspoon, who both basically play themselves.
The tone is playful, childlike. It’s like a Spy Kids mission to save the father who got lost in another dimension. 
The costumes are stunning, bold, and bright like a Project Runway finale.
Storm Reid is the young actress who plays Meg. She is believable, vulnerable, lovely.
This was my favorite novel growing up. I delighted over every one of Madeleine L’Engle’s paragraphs detailing the adventure with Meg the dreamer, meg the feeler, Meg the insecure but capable girl. School days felt odd and long then, and I longed for the stargazing rock where she would go to contemplate the universe and fixing its problems. Charles Wallace, precocious and kind, too often caught up in his own world, always supported his misfit sister. 
And Calvin the sad boy with a lion’s heart and more patience than most somehow joined in on the journey. In the book there is a flying horse – a pegasus, a stuttering witch woman or three (much like the Fates of Greek myth), a dog who understands, and a feverish fight against the It of darkness.
Somehow sitting in the theater through this hour + music video with a plot felt like a counseling session as each character took a turn cupping Meg’s face to remind her, with tears in their eyes, to believe the truths about herself and to run from lies. You are special. You are valuable. You are wanted. You are smart. You are enough. You are loved. That feels like time well spent. 
Joe Wright’s Pan is a kiss and a miss.
But then he missed…well a followable plot. It opens with an explanation in narration that this is a set up, a prequel, pre-Pan the backstory. Audiences most likely presupposed that this film would stray from the beloved J.M. Barrie novels, but not to this degree of confusion.
Sadly, this one poses too many questions then fails to answer them. Is Pan the one? Who is good vs who is evil? Matrix and monomyth connections ensue, and it’s just too much. Too many cooks in the kitchen, as they say. Too many swirling ideas. Too many supernatural cards in play. Blake Snyder calls this “Double Mumbo Jumbo.” 
The storyline pours in in irreconcilable duos: grief over dead parents AND kidnapped by pirates, fear of heights AND space travel, belief in fairies AND eternal life.
These themes of kidnapping, death, and slavery, as well as long scenes of violence make this film far too dark for its target audience: small children. It takes deep, pendulous swings from death and fear into pirate hijinks AND a quirky trampoline UFC fighting. Odd duos.
Small Peter, played by Levi Miller, was lovely and vulnerable as a young Pan, but lacked the sass and strong will that Pan is known for. His deathly fear of heights was also a plot twists for the age-old flying Pan ideal. Sky pirate, Blackbeard, kidnaps slaves from around the world to work in the mines of Neverland hunting for the precious pixie rock dust, “Pixum.” We later assume, though it is unclear, that “Pixum” is both the key to flight AND long life. Pan leans on far too many assumptions. It plays like a hero journey outline with whole sections stolen from other films and some unfinished Polar Express-esque graphics spliced in. It’s basically Star Wars, but it made me want to go home and watch Hook with Robin Williams.
He becomes Han Solo swooping in on his ship to rescue and woo princess Tiger Lily and save the day by helping the boy Pan meet his destiny. Huh? 
Tiger Lily is the Princess Leia type. She sassy and cause-driven. She can fight, and she bravely stands up against the man in black after watching him kill her family members. Despite the script, Rooney Mara almost saves this film as she underplays Tiger Lily bringing the only subtlety and therefore believable balance to a gentle Peter waiting to become the Pan.
The “score” exemplifies the film’s bipolar trends. Classic orchestrated film score turns rock opera upon arrival in Neverland as the whole cavernous mountain area filled with mining boys and old men pirates sing Nirvanva’s “Smells like Teen Spirit.” Hugh Jackman makes his Blackbeard entrance singing “Here we are now, entertain us.” 
It all could have perhaps worked had this effort repeated itself like in A Knights Tale or in Moulin Rouge, or had they not gone to such lengths to set the film in WWII decades before Nirvana fans tripped similarly into their own Neverlands.
Splatter: on FILM 
