In today’s day and age that everyone likes to think is where
the practice of rampant recycling of media to create movies started, said
recycling can take different forms. One of these is the oh-so-awesome prequel,
easily the least successful of all of them. I mean, when online lists of the
‘best’ film prequels frequently bring up Star Wars, you know that the standards
for quality aren’t exactly high amongst this pedigree. An offspring of this is
the origin story, a film based around a beloved franchise character and how
they became the one that we love to this day. Of course, once again, recent
examples of this aren’t too promising: X-Men Origins Wolverine managed to ruin
the reputation of more than just the title character, Dumb And Dumberer was
about as pointless as you can get and
Maleficent, while I personally liked it,
was a major flop with critics and audiences. Hell, bring up the words ‘horror
movie prequel’ in a crowded room and someone is bound to re-enact one of them
using you as the victim; some people take this stuff a little
too seriously. With all this in mind,
ever since today’s film was announced as an origin story for that legendary
Lost Boy Peter Pan, I was immediately sceptical (A shocking development, I
know) about how well it would work out. And then I actually saw the thing… oh
boy.
In 1991, out of the haze of hair metal and obnoxiously
overblown metrosexuality, Nirvana broke onto the pop music scene and pretty
much razed the entire landscape around them. From there, they rebuilt from the
ashes to create what would end up being the definitive musical attitude for the
90’s. All of a sudden, “alternative” artists broke out into the mainstream,
bringing with them a sense of raw vulnerability and unflinching emotion the
likes of which hadn’t been seen before. This would later give birth to the
rarely-if-ever-good nu-metal movement and, God help us, Nickelback, but for the
time being, Kurt Cobain and company were at the level of new rock gods. But
then, typical rock star backstage drama took place, unfortunately ending in
Kurt’s suicide in 1994. We’ve seen plenty of documentaries emerge about the
artist, as well as a film loosely based on his story by Gus Van Sant in the
form of Last Days, but this should prove to be something different. Not only is
it co-produced by HBO, the only TV channel that carries consistent quality when
it comes to feature-length productions, but this is also the first doco to be
made with the support of the Cobain family. Will that extra access lead to
something special?
