Cast: Hugh Jackman, Levi Miller, Rooney Mara
Director: Joe Wright
Rating: 2.5 stars
Peter Pan, a 12-year-old boy in an orphanage, escapes to Neverland, a wonderful world where he finds relief from his mundane life. A world that is so strange that it becomes beautiful. Peter experiences a series of changes: he’s the anointed “Chosen One” of an old prophecy, he has strange abilities far beyond what he could dream of when he was one among the thousands of orphans living in one of hundreds of orphanages.
This Peter Pan prequel is dramatised well considering the devices used to create the narrative — Peter is taken away from the orphanage and is transported to work in the slave mines of Blackbeard the Pirate (Hugh Jackman) and this sets up the legend of Peter Pan rather nicely. Pan is a prequel to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan which was written and staged in the early 1900s.
It is an invented story providing us the origins of Peter Pan and Captain Hook, setting the stage for a sequel in a new franchise. Hugh Jackman is excellent as Blackbeard. He doesn’t reveal himself much, getting himself higher up in the league of actors who transform themselves for their characters.
