The other weekend my 8 year old and I had 6 hours to kill between her soccer games. We did a bit of geocaching, but the weather wasn't in our favor and it started to mist, followed by rain. Geocaching in the rain is no fun so we needed to find a different activity to occupy our time. We checked the local movie listings and found Pan was playing and fit in our schedule. We'd seen previews for Pan and wanted to see it and this was the perfect opportunity.
I realize Pan has gotten poor reviews and has been a box office bomb compared to the production costs, but we both enjoyed the movie. It wasn't the greatest of movies, but I didn't feel we wasted our money buying tickets to see it. There were, however, a few bad science scenes that bugged me.
Yes, flying is impossible, but that's something everyone needs to accept because that is key to the story of Peter Pan. Thus I have no problems with the flying. My biggest issues have to do with gravity. Regardless of Peter flying or the ships flying, the laws of gravity still exist in Neverland. Here are my two biggest science problems as they relate to gravity.
1. The ships are constantly moving and twisting upside down. Some stuff falls off, but not nearly as much as should.
2. There's a scene in which Hook falls off a crystal structure and appears to plummet to his death. Pan then flies down and grabs Hook, saving him from certain death. Again, I have no problem with Pan flying. However, there's a several second delay before Pan jumps off to save Hook. It does not appear to be an infinite fall, thus Hook would have smashed into the ground before Pan ever left the ship. I don't know the exact time delay between Hook falling and Pan jumping, but it was probably on the order of 30 seconds. Let's assume that's too high and only 10 seconds went by. In 10 seconds, Hook, in free-fall, would have fallen 490 m or about 1/2 km. If it was a 30 second fall, Hook would have fallen 4.4 km. Again, Pan could not have caught up. If the delay was a second, then I could believe it, but given the time that went by in the movie, nope, not believable.
3. Early in the movie when Blackbeard kicks Pan off the ship, Pan falls a long distance in free fall. Just before hitting the ground he stops, discovering he can fly. Given Pan's speed and almost instantaneous stop, Pan would have blacked out given the extremely large g-force acting on him. Pan, however, did not black out. Instead, he was thrilled and excited. No pain whatsoever as one would expect.
I'm being picky, I know. I enjoyed the movie and so did my daughter. Despite some bad science, I'm still glad I saw it.
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