Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
May. 26th, 2007 05:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
verbminxMan, this movie was just... weird. There were some things I thought they handled well, some things that I thought could have been handled better, and, in general, kind of a disjointed feel. I can't decide whether I think it's awesome or awful, and I think it might be a bit of both.
I knew about some of the film's events because I have a copy of a script that was circulating the internet last summer, and was confirmed genuine - BUT an early draft - by one of the writers. I think the majority of the stuff stayed in the film, but the outcome is different.
The things I didn't like:
- The fact that multi-Jacks stayed with Jack after they left the Locker. If those were part of his personal Hell, they should have been left there. If they were part of his general insanity, they should have been in all three films. Most of the extra Jacks looked really fake, as fake as similar effects in movies that were made 20 years ago (I'm thinking of the obviously greenscreened brownies in Willow). This worked in the scenes in the Locker, which have to be the strangest thing I've ever seen in a "summer blockbuster" sort of film, and didn't work when the Jacks were in Jack's hair or in the brig on the Flying Dutchman.
- Calypso's release from human form: she got very corporeally large in the same form, growled a lot, and turned into about 100,000,000 crabs. The growing effect, at least, looked really fake. I think it would have been preferable to see something exit her normal-sized body and then grow to immense size and dissolve into crabs.
- I can accept Will becoming the captain of the Flying Dutchman, although it's tragic. I kind of appreciated a willingness to not do the happy ending fanservice that most movies of this kind have. But what totally pissed me off was what Elizabeth did after that: went and sat on Some Island Somewhere to wait for Will to come around every 10 years, apparently arriving with only a chest containing her husband's heart, and having a kid completely on her own. Do I need to explain how lame this is? We're talking about the same character who had just been elected King of the Pirates and who had, until just prior to that, been Miss Adventure. Not to mention that it's awfully convenient that the "one day they spent together on shore" happened to be the day she was ovulating. Please - don't these people know how babies are made? To me it would have been much more believable, or at least less annoying, if she'd stayed primarily on the seas and basically just came to land to keep her appointments with Will. (Their story is over, but if they were to pursue the Fountain of Youth angle in a future film, it would be a nice cameo moment for Elizabeth if Jack brought her some of its water.)
- The Calypso/Davy Jones story is never really resolved; he's just reclaimed by the sea. Cutler Beckett, in the end, is a completely neutered villain who winds up having little to do with the film's climax. One of his most villainous acts, in context of the story, happens offscreen.
- Norrington's death was supposed to be a redemption, but it really doesn't seem to have mattered much. It seemed more like something that happened to get the character out of the way, because they couldn't figure out what to do with him at the end. It was a given that Swann would die - anyone who knows anything about dramatic structure would have predicted it by the end of the last film - but Norrington is a character that could have been utilized better. (Maybe, for instance, a confrontation with Beckett at the end.)
- The sound mix wasn't great. Several accents, and their attendant dialect/phrasing, are so heavy that once music was added to the mix, it was difficult to understand what the characters were saying. This was particularly a problem with Tia Dalma/Calypso and Davy Jones.
- The three against three parlay after the meeting of the brethren had an electric guitar theme as background. Since this instrument has been used nowhere else on the soundtrack, it felt out of place. (I think it was used because Keith Richards had been in the previous scenes, and I think he was the guitarist playing. But it didn't sound like part of this film's soundtrack.)
- The opening minutes of the maelstrom battle scene were poorly edited in terms of being able to tell what was going on... the action was just mass confusion.
- To not find this movie at least a little confused, you have to really care about Bootstrap. Do you? I don't - not enough, anyway. I thought that Will's stint on the Dutchman in the second film was what made that film a little too long. I can't think of any way to restructure it, because it is needed to make any of the characters aside from Jack emotionally invested in the Dutchman's fate, and it puts a human face on that ship's crew. But I wouldn't have minded if the whole story became a smaller subplot.
Some other points:
- The opening is a serious downer.
- I thought it would be Barbossa or Beckett who stabbed Jones's heart, probably Barbossa. If, however, the ship had been diverted from its purpose and needed to be reformed, it couldn't be taken over by a villainous character. That being the case, I never found Jack's desire to take over the Flying Dutchman convincing. Fountain of Youth, yes, because it's not a job.
- I liked Sao Feng's concubines' style! I'm talking about the two girls in black and red who stood behind him in his lair at the beginning of the film. I kind of thought that the scars on his head were a mistake, because it interfered with Chow Yun-Fat's ability to move the upper half of his face, and thus he wasn't as expressive as usual. But he was very good in his final scene.
- The monkey and the parrot are reliable comedy in this one, and the monkey has developed into a full-fledged character.
- It's no surprise that the two Navy buffoons from whom Jack stole the ship in the first film fall in easily with Pintel and Raghetti once given a chance. It WAS a surprise that the "piece of eight" under Barbossa's care was poor Raghetti's wooden eye!
- Complain though I may about multiple Jacks, I really enjoyed the peculiarity of the Locker scene. The tattoos! (Vinculus?) And the Jack In Goat Form! Man, that sequence is, bar none, the strangest thing I've ever seen in a big, expensive, feel-good summer movie. (This was more of a feel-BAD, or feel-WEIRD, sort of movie.) Can you imagine that sort of interlude in an Indiana Jones or Star Wars movie? I loved the little rock/crabs. I made a crack in the theater, "This is like if all the neighborhood cats tried to steal your car!"
- I just, between the last line and this one, read![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cleolinda's take on this, because I knew she would have one, and lo, she is making many of the same points I am. However, if you hated the movie because of the unhappy ending, you should go read her points too. The writers say that because Elizabeth was waiting on the beach at the end of the 10 years, the curse was broken and Will no longer had to be captain of the Flying Dutchman. The reason Davy Jones hated Calypso, and helped her to be trapped in human form, was because she wasn't on the beach at the end of his ten years. This would explain why Elizabeth was content to sit around for 10 years, I guess, and why it wouldn't be necessary for her to have a cameo in any putative films in which Jack goes off in search of the Fountain of Youth.
And a note: this movie doesn't in any way stand alone. You could probably watch POTC2 and accept it as "the end" - Jack dies, fabulously, people want to rescue him, Bootstrap is stuck on the Flying Dutchman, Beckett is going to control the sea. It's open-ended, but structurally, it works OK as a film on its own. At World's End follows absolutely off all those events, and feels more like the second half of a miniseries that was begun with Dead Man's Chest. Even in the theater, structurally, it doesn't feel like its own movie; it feels like the extended climactic section of something much longer. This isn't to say that most of it is action-oriented - there are a lot of scenes that are conversations between various factions. But there's an urgency and bombast to everything that happens that makes it feel like an endgame.
I'm not going to tell you whether or not to go see it, I'm just going to say that it probably isn't exactly what you're expecting, based both on the two previous films and on other films of its type. If you do go see it, WAIT UNTIL AFTER THE CREDITS FOR THE "HIDDEN" SCENE. It's actually important to the plot, rather than just being a cute little easter egg. Then come back and read my list of points here, or go readcleolinda's.
I knew about some of the film's events because I have a copy of a script that was circulating the internet last summer, and was confirmed genuine - BUT an early draft - by one of the writers. I think the majority of the stuff stayed in the film, but the outcome is different.
The things I didn't like:
- The fact that multi-Jacks stayed with Jack after they left the Locker. If those were part of his personal Hell, they should have been left there. If they were part of his general insanity, they should have been in all three films. Most of the extra Jacks looked really fake, as fake as similar effects in movies that were made 20 years ago (I'm thinking of the obviously greenscreened brownies in Willow). This worked in the scenes in the Locker, which have to be the strangest thing I've ever seen in a "summer blockbuster" sort of film, and didn't work when the Jacks were in Jack's hair or in the brig on the Flying Dutchman.
- Calypso's release from human form: she got very corporeally large in the same form, growled a lot, and turned into about 100,000,000 crabs. The growing effect, at least, looked really fake. I think it would have been preferable to see something exit her normal-sized body and then grow to immense size and dissolve into crabs.
- I can accept Will becoming the captain of the Flying Dutchman, although it's tragic. I kind of appreciated a willingness to not do the happy ending fanservice that most movies of this kind have. But what totally pissed me off was what Elizabeth did after that: went and sat on Some Island Somewhere to wait for Will to come around every 10 years, apparently arriving with only a chest containing her husband's heart, and having a kid completely on her own. Do I need to explain how lame this is? We're talking about the same character who had just been elected King of the Pirates and who had, until just prior to that, been Miss Adventure. Not to mention that it's awfully convenient that the "one day they spent together on shore" happened to be the day she was ovulating. Please - don't these people know how babies are made? To me it would have been much more believable, or at least less annoying, if she'd stayed primarily on the seas and basically just came to land to keep her appointments with Will. (Their story is over, but if they were to pursue the Fountain of Youth angle in a future film, it would be a nice cameo moment for Elizabeth if Jack brought her some of its water.)
- The Calypso/Davy Jones story is never really resolved; he's just reclaimed by the sea. Cutler Beckett, in the end, is a completely neutered villain who winds up having little to do with the film's climax. One of his most villainous acts, in context of the story, happens offscreen.
- Norrington's death was supposed to be a redemption, but it really doesn't seem to have mattered much. It seemed more like something that happened to get the character out of the way, because they couldn't figure out what to do with him at the end. It was a given that Swann would die - anyone who knows anything about dramatic structure would have predicted it by the end of the last film - but Norrington is a character that could have been utilized better. (Maybe, for instance, a confrontation with Beckett at the end.)
- The sound mix wasn't great. Several accents, and their attendant dialect/phrasing, are so heavy that once music was added to the mix, it was difficult to understand what the characters were saying. This was particularly a problem with Tia Dalma/Calypso and Davy Jones.
- The three against three parlay after the meeting of the brethren had an electric guitar theme as background. Since this instrument has been used nowhere else on the soundtrack, it felt out of place. (I think it was used because Keith Richards had been in the previous scenes, and I think he was the guitarist playing. But it didn't sound like part of this film's soundtrack.)
- The opening minutes of the maelstrom battle scene were poorly edited in terms of being able to tell what was going on... the action was just mass confusion.
- To not find this movie at least a little confused, you have to really care about Bootstrap. Do you? I don't - not enough, anyway. I thought that Will's stint on the Dutchman in the second film was what made that film a little too long. I can't think of any way to restructure it, because it is needed to make any of the characters aside from Jack emotionally invested in the Dutchman's fate, and it puts a human face on that ship's crew. But I wouldn't have minded if the whole story became a smaller subplot.
Some other points:
- The opening is a serious downer.
- I thought it would be Barbossa or Beckett who stabbed Jones's heart, probably Barbossa. If, however, the ship had been diverted from its purpose and needed to be reformed, it couldn't be taken over by a villainous character. That being the case, I never found Jack's desire to take over the Flying Dutchman convincing. Fountain of Youth, yes, because it's not a job.
- I liked Sao Feng's concubines' style! I'm talking about the two girls in black and red who stood behind him in his lair at the beginning of the film. I kind of thought that the scars on his head were a mistake, because it interfered with Chow Yun-Fat's ability to move the upper half of his face, and thus he wasn't as expressive as usual. But he was very good in his final scene.
- The monkey and the parrot are reliable comedy in this one, and the monkey has developed into a full-fledged character.
- It's no surprise that the two Navy buffoons from whom Jack stole the ship in the first film fall in easily with Pintel and Raghetti once given a chance. It WAS a surprise that the "piece of eight" under Barbossa's care was poor Raghetti's wooden eye!
- Complain though I may about multiple Jacks, I really enjoyed the peculiarity of the Locker scene. The tattoos! (Vinculus?) And the Jack In Goat Form! Man, that sequence is, bar none, the strangest thing I've ever seen in a big, expensive, feel-
- I just, between the last line and this one, read
cleolinda's take on this, because I knew she would have one, and lo, she is making many of the same points I am. However, if you hated the movie because of the unhappy ending, you should go read her points too. The writers say that because Elizabeth was waiting on the beach at the end of the 10 years, the curse was broken and Will no longer had to be captain of the Flying Dutchman. The reason Davy Jones hated Calypso, and helped her to be trapped in human form, was because she wasn't on the beach at the end of his ten years. This would explain why Elizabeth was content to sit around for 10 years, I guess, and why it wouldn't be necessary for her to have a cameo in any putative films in which Jack goes off in search of the Fountain of Youth.And a note: this movie doesn't in any way stand alone. You could probably watch POTC2 and accept it as "the end" - Jack dies, fabulously, people want to rescue him, Bootstrap is stuck on the Flying Dutchman, Beckett is going to control the sea. It's open-ended, but structurally, it works OK as a film on its own. At World's End follows absolutely off all those events, and feels more like the second half of a miniseries that was begun with Dead Man's Chest. Even in the theater, structurally, it doesn't feel like its own movie; it feels like the extended climactic section of something much longer. This isn't to say that most of it is action-oriented - there are a lot of scenes that are conversations between various factions. But there's an urgency and bombast to everything that happens that makes it feel like an endgame.
I'm not going to tell you whether or not to go see it, I'm just going to say that it probably isn't exactly what you're expecting, based both on the two previous films and on other films of its type. If you do go see it, WAIT UNTIL AFTER THE CREDITS FOR THE "HIDDEN" SCENE. It's actually important to the plot, rather than just being a cute little easter egg. Then come back and read my list of points here, or go read
cleolinda's.
