I just watched Syfy’s Neverland on YouTube, and it was okay.
The movie was better than 2015’s Pan I’ll tell you that much!
But there were some things that made no sense and bugged me!
They tried to explain some Neverland things with science gobblygook that was totally pointless and unnecessary.
For some reason, the whole movie, everybody calls fairies “tree spirits” and pixie dust “mineral dust”. Seriously, why?
It was really confusing, at least to me, what Hook’s motivation was, and his character wasn’t fleshed out enough.
Peter, Hook, and Lost Boys, go to Neverland via a magical orb thing and it’s never explained where that came from. And Hook really wants that orb at the beginning and it’s never explained why.
At one point Peter’s memory is wiped but then 10 minutes later, he gets it back and it was pointless and had no effect on anything!
This might be a spoiler, but this really annoyed and confused me, Hook getting his hand cut off on Peter’s sword and getting eaten by the crocodile (which some reason is humongous and has multiple legs) happens BY ACCIDENT! WHY?
This is a major spoiler, so I won’t go into specifics, but Hook’s backstory makes no sense! And they could have made it interesting, but for some reason they chose to give Hook this nonsensical backstory that I think they copied from a different character from another popular fantasy story, which I won’t say in case you figure it out and don’t want the secret spoiled!
And they never explain how Peter’s last name became Pan, and they never call him that! That’s the other half of his name, how could you forget to explain that!!
The filmmakers of this movie make these little confusing changes that could have very easily been rewritten and made the movie better! I know most of these are little things, but they matter to make world make sense, ESPECIALLY when you’re making a prequel that’s supposed to explain the origins of a story that most people watching the movie are familiar with!
Also the ending of the movie was rushed and confusing.
And the CGI is pretty bad, but I can mostly let that slide since this was a TV movie and not a big budget Hollywood movie!
Okay ranting over, on to the positives!
The acting in this movie is mostly very good!
I thought Charlie Rowe was excellent as Peter!
Rhys Ifans was great as Hook despite what little he’s given to work with with the writing of his character.
And the onscreen chemistry between Rowe and Ifans was very good!
I also liked that Peter and the Lost Boys called Hook “Jimmy” since that’s a nice reference to JMB being called Jimmy by some people close to him like Sylvia Llewelyn Davies!
Anna Friel was very good as the villain pirate precursor to Hook. And she could actually be intimidating at times (more than I can say about Blackbeard from Pan).
When there was no CGI, the island of Neverland looked good! Which is definitely something this movie has over the Pan movie!
The portrayal of the Native Americans was very good too it seems!
If you’re still reading this, I congratulate you and thank you!
Despite its flaws, I still recommend you watch the movie! Like I keep saying, it’s a much better Peter Pan prequel movie than Pan, and I don’t think we’ll get another prequel to P.P.’s story anytime soon!
It’s disappointing that the filmmakers didn’t make the story more like Barrie’s vision, but the movie on its own is fine, not excellent, not horrible, but fine! And there are a lot of scenes I enjoyed, great performances, and I think you’ll have a pretty good time watching it!
You can watch the movie for free on YouTube!
Here’s the link:
https://youtu.be/BVS2qbZSKGE
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