Pan (2015)

Joe Wright's Pan arrives as an alternate prequel to a play most of us absorbed before we could read, and it spends its budget on the proposition that Neverland needed a gritty industrial backstory. The production announced its intentions early, with the director seeking a very international and multi-racial Neverland. The supporting bench delivers on that promise in a modest way: Nonso Anozie, Adeel Akhtar, Jack Charles and Na Tae-joo fill out the pirate and native ranks. The four leads remain uniformly pale, and Rooney Mara's Tiger Lily generated a petition before the film even opened. That controversy lived in the press, not the screenplay. Inside the text, Tiger Lily is simply a warrior who duels Blackbeard, and Mary is retroactively revealed as a great warrior, achievements that sit lightly on a chosen-boy adventure that keeps its focus on the flying child.

The film's conscience, such as it is, concerns labor. Mother Barnabas hoards food while her orphans starve. Blackbeard kidnaps children and works them in a Pixum mine to sustain his own immortality, a tidy arrangement of exploitation that the camera treats as set dressing. Variety noted the unsustainable mineral extraction; the film itself files no complaint on behalf of the earth. There is no LGBTQ material, no body-diverse representation, no neurodivergent characterization. The fantasy is a fantasy of destiny, and destiny has a narrow casting department.

As for history, Peter Pan is fiction, so the reimagining of Hook as a handsome young friend rewrites a storybook instead of a record. Weep for the archives another day. The sermonizing is confined to believing in yourself, spoken with the urgency of a boy who has just learned to fly. It is a loud, expensive, occasionally beautiful failure, and the score and Levi Miller's performance deserve better than the reception they got. But we classify, we do not console.