Of stars and ships...

[i_autumnheart]

I just got back from seeing Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End with Jane Doe and Miss Maeve (after carefully dodging spoilers almost successfully for a couple of days) and had some thoughts about it I wanted to get down before they fade.

This is unfortunately not the big essay on it that I planned to write after seeing Dead Man's Chest last year. I do still plan to write that, but simultaneously having time and inspiration to do so is a condition which has thus far eluded me - perhaps in a few days (but don't hold your breath).

Moving on...

• Geoffrey Rush as Barbosa totally carried this movie. Not due to anything I can pin down, but he just seemed to have that bit of extra colour, or personality or something right from when he bit into that apple in Tia Dalma's hut at the end of DMC. Possibly the textbook definition of great-actorness, I guess - even (or perhaps especially) in a character role like this one as opposed to something more serious.
• Multiple personality Jack Sparrow - fun, scenic and clearly played for laughs a little further than was required by the demands of Plot. I have to confess that my first thought was 'Oooh - enough Jack to go round" :g:, but like the cannibal island scene in DMC I actually think that this could have been shortened by a repeat or two to help the pace a bit. I suspect I am not in the target audience that it was aimed at.
• Jack and Barbosa and the Ship with Too many Captains: I really liked how this was played. However strongly Jack identifies with the Pearl, Barbosa did serve as her Captain for ten years, and Jack in turn seemed to yield command to Will and Elizabeth when he was busy running from the Kraken. All four have strong claims to the ship, and there was no way it was ever going to be decided easily. Interesting that the overt competition for captaincy was between Barbosa and Jack (who really seemed to be concerned that he didn't measure up :snerk:) and yet Will and Elizabeth effectively command in the end.
• The East India Trading Company - I admit I tend to find these scenes jarring: the mix of Davy Jones' crew and the company officers ( which I see as 'real world') doesn't quite work for me. Speaking of company officers - I get that the company was extremely powerful, but I'm pretty sure they were originally officers of the British Army, and can't quite belive that their transferral like that would have been possible, no matter how cowed poor Governor Swann might be. I do find the poncy teacup as the indication that they have claimed and tamed the seas rather amusing: and an effective balance for the pirates' bottles of rum.
• Davy Jones doing the bidding of the EITCo: I kind of wish we'd gotten to see how this got set up, because I wouldn't have thought he could be so diminished by even the threat of his own death. He is clearly out of place and out of his depth, with all his terrifying, larger-than-life mystery stripped away so that he is reduced to being merely a complicated sort of weapon at the command of another. I can't help but wonder what would have happened had he still had the kraken available when he ran up against Beckett...
• 
  Calypso - I have mixed feelings about this subplot. I have very carefully avoided spoilers for this movie, so I didn't know about it in advance, and there are a few things about it I currently feel should have happened differently. These opinions may be subject to change on a second viewing!
  
  I currently feel that the overall story arc works quite well, but I have issues with some of the details: for instance, I really disliked the giant-kewpie-doll-goddess effect. For a goddess that has been reduced and bound into a single form to then just take a larger version of it seems quite pointless - it didn't add anything other than an opportunity for her to show a bit of leg. My initial thought was that she should have taken the form of something like the kraken if she needed something corporeal, but on a few hour's reflection I think that that is me retconning the Sea-Mother manifestation from Diana Paxson's Westria books - and the Sea Witch from The Little Mermaid, now that I think about it, so perhaps not. The millions of crabs is perhaps an acceptable metaphor then- as something that looks like it belongs in the barren depths, scavenging whale carcasses, it definitely has an all things shall come to me in the end connotation to it!
  
  As for the failed romance between Calypso and Davy Jones - I really liked the scene between them in the brig of the Pearl - it gave Jones that last bit of humanity he needed to be a sympathetic character, and also neatly filled in all the banks on their backstory and mutual betrayals. I felt that it also set up the possibility of reunion between them, though - and yet she didn't claim him in the end. In the final battle she seemed to be reduced to Weather, which is rather less focused than I would have expected.
  
  What I would have liked to have seen is for her to take a more active role - almost certainly unsympathetic to all sides - and then turn aside from the Pearl because of Raghetti :) I kind of feel that he deserves it.
  
• Apropos of deserving, Norrington's death was a total waste. It came across as a way to remove a dangling subplot that had been forgotten until it was too late to weave it in neatly - or possibly (in hindsight), as a way to NOT give the shippers an easy path to put him and Elizabeth back together. Sloppy, in either case.

OK - this post has gotten way longer than I expected and has taken ages to write so far and I have work tomorrow - or rather, later today. I do have more to write, so hopefully won't forget it between now and then. More later!