Pan Movie Review

Review by Austin Clemen

Pan is a movie directed by Joe Wright and stars Levi Miller, Hugh Jackman, Garrett Hedlund, and Rooney Mara.  It is a re-imagining of the story of Peter Pan as an origin story.  Now, the trailer looked nice for this movie and the whole premise was something that very much intrigued me.  However, while watching the movie, I never really got past the intriguing part.  Each new thing they introduced intrigued me, but they never developed anything fully enough for me to actually become engaged in the movie or find it to be a great movie.

They reimagined many of the characters from the original Peter Pan as slightly different characters and I wouldn’t say that all of the casting choices were good, especially Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily.  Like what?  That casting choice makes no sense to me, but at least she gave it a try?  Sort of?  I will say this, I did like Hugh Jackman as Blackbeard and Levi Miller as Peter Pan.  Those two casting choices were pretty good and they each actually did try to do their best with what they were given.

Back to not fully believing anything that they introduced to me… The world of Neverland is supposed to be a happy and magical place where anything can happen.  You don’t even get to see the main part of Neverland until about one third of the way into the movie.  Then, once you do, it’s not even a fully believable Neverland.  A vast majority of the CGI in this movie is poorly done for being a big budget Disney movie, especially when it comes to the beasts of Neverland or the people that have CG parts at different times in the movie.  Every character needed a little more developing, too, as I could not fully understand their motives or believe them as a character with how little we go into each character.  Also, they never gave us a hint that Hook was going to become the bad guy!  Ever!  He even (spoiler alert) keeps his hand for the entire movie!  Hook and Pan remain friends from the time the start their journey together until the end of the movie.  The pacing in Pan is off throughout the entire thing.  The beginning is a little slow, then it speeds up almost too much, then slows way back down, then you’re just kinda forced to go super quickly through it again.  It ends up feeling a little longer than it actually is.

All of that aside, though, I will say that Pan was a little better than I expected.  It was enjoyable if you don’t try to watch it with a critic’s eye.  However, Pan is more of a type of movie I would expect to see go straight to DVD or straight to TV rather than in theaters, and I would recommend you wait to see it until it does go to RedBox or Netflix.

I’d give Pan a rating of 6.7 out of 10.