fear and loathing in the caribbean: or, how i learned to stop worrying and love the sea turtles.
[needless to say, spoilers ahoy. as in, a lot. watchy-watchy before clicky-clicky, savvy? (no, really.)]
pirates of the caribbean: the curse of the black pearl exceeded absolutely everybody's expectations, especially when held up next to the country bears and the haunted mansion. it was good, it was deep, it was depp. and there was interesting story and much pretty and a great deal of fun to be had by all.
pirates of the caribbean: dead man's chest enhanced the palette and broadened the scope of the first film considerably. there were extraordinary new villains, including a freaking sea monster, and an extraordinarily intricate story in the telling.
pirates of the caribbean: at world's end has this really awesome scene where a monkey pulls a gun on a parrot.
[i'm not kidding. i spoil the living hell out of this movie under the cut. it's not just themes this time around; i get into the missteps of the filmmakers, and very few stones are left uncrabbed. do NOT say i didn't warn you.]
do you remember what it was like? in july of 2006, we didn't know what was coming next, but we were all pretty sure of one thing: in 46 weeks, we were in for a hell of a concluding chapter, and when it got here it was going to be awesome.
For too long I've been parched with thirst and unable to quench it. Too long I've been starving to death and haven't died. I feel
nothing -- not the wind on my face nor the spray of the sea, nor the warmth of a woman's flesh.
first and foremost: barbossa was back. sorry, let me rephrase that: BARBOSSA WAS BACK. holy. shit. one of the most magnificent bad guys of all time, and he wasn't just not dead any more, he was alive. eating apples and everything. one could only imagine the falstaffian indulgences he would be up to in the sequel, given how long he'd been denied worldly pleasures. the obvious yet inevitable scene, where he makes a pass at elizabeth, would alone be worth the price of admission. and what would a mind like his have to say about dying, having made his way back to the land of the living? the possibilities were just phenomenally fascinating. one thing was certain: it was going to be awesome.
My story . . . it's exactly the same as your story, just one chapter behind.
then there was the delightful smackdown that norrington would inevitably deploy on the east india trading company. he was perfectly placed, the anti-hero that's got just a little too much sympathy for pirates (in spite of himself), even as he's placed in a position of command in the halliburtoned royal navy. who better to restore the honor of the crown, probably with murtogg and mullroy's help? it wasn't too obvious what role he'd finally play in the climax of the third film, but there was no way it wouldn't be a spectacular one, given how much time and effort they'd spent taking a rather petty bad guy from the first movie and turning him into a genuinely interesting, conflicted foil in the second. while it might be a bit much to have yet another "i think we can give them one day's head start" sort of ending, he was definitely one of the better aces any screenwriters, (or at least any worth, as they say, their salt), could possibly have up their respective sleeves. it was going to be awesome.
Governor Swann, still. Do you think I wear this wig to keep my head warm?
and by restoration of the crown's proper role in the caribbean, i'm speaking, of course, of the restoration of governor weatherby swann. let's face it, you don't keep a pimp like j-dawg in the dugout for two whole movies without one HELL of a denouement in the wings. just seeing the conclusion of the arc of the mistrust he had for will turner, an unresolved conflict they'd been building for two movies now, promised to be an incredible moment. maybe when he was walking his daughter down the aisle, or maybe when norrington and turner found themselves having to set aside their differences to save elizabeth jack, another loose end the third movie would have to touch on sooner or later. when we finally got to the "and THAT'S why you hire jonathan freaking PRYCE for a role like this" moment, it was going to be awesome.
"One word, love. Curiosity. You long for freedom. You long to do what you want to do because you want it. To act on selfish
impulse. You want to see what it's like. One day, you won't be able to resist." - Jack Sparrow
but the crème de la crème, the moment we'd all been waiting for, the bit that i couldn't anticipate, the scene i couldn't wait to see because i honestly had no idea, coming out of the second movie, just how the hell they could possibly pull it off, was the inevitable conversation between jack and elizabeth. i mean, what do you say to the man you've killed when he returns from the dead and stands before you? "sorry" doesn't quite cut it. neither does "whoops." ditto "my bad." i mean, you could see it in the look in her eyes at the end of the second movie: the guilt was just searing into her psyche. it wasn't just about getting jack back, it was about being able to look at herself in the mirror again, as in ever. she would eventually get her happily ever after, once will finally squared his conflict with jack in whatever form that would finally take (needless to say: awesome), and jack would get his chance to sail off into the sunset. but in the meantime, jack and elizabeth had a HELL of a palaver to get through first, and i just couldn't wait to see how it all fell into place. awesome, awesome, awesome.
it begins promisingly enough. hell, the opening prologue is simply breathtaking. an assembly line of executions is formed as wave after wave of captured pirates are hung at beckett's gallows, while a redcoat ominously reads the patriot act official decree which has stripped them of their habeas corpus rights (featuring a holocaust museum-sized pile of boots, just in case somebody missed the point).
a dirge from a doomed cabin boy (the all new musical interlude "hoist the colors," which provides the third movie's score with an especially poignant counterpoint to balance the themes from the first two films) turns into a grand choral call to arms, the condemned using their last breaths to cry out for posthumous vengeance from their pirate brethren. suddenly, it's les miserables of the caribbean, and as the title credits appear, even as you're still trying to process the fact that ZOMG THEY JUST HUNG A KID IN A DISNEY MOVIE, the snare drums fade into the darkness and the stakes, you realize, couldn't possibly be higher. the pirates are fighting for their very lives.
[except, well . . . we've already met the resurrected bootstrap bill and captain barbossa in the last film, and we know damn well from the trailer that jack's coming back too. the pirates franchise might as well have been imagined by joss whedon, so unfinal is the final judgment.]
then the credits fade. and the trouble begins.
princess leia elizabeth swann, disguised as a bounty hunter slave girl, arrives at jabba the hutt's sao feng's palace in
tatooine singapore (along with chewbacca barbossa) to cut a deal, finally rescuing han solo will turner . . .
let me back up a bit. you might want to get comfortable; this is going to take a while. i'm approaching this as not simply a thematic exploration, but also a what-the-hell-happened? breakdown of the events of the story itself, as a public service to those who only saw it once, got lost, and don't feel like going back for more.
the two most important trivia bullet points on the imdb page about pirates of the caribbean: at world's end are these:
• they started filming without a finished script.
• the first cut of the film was over 3 hours long.
that pretty much tells you absolutely everything you need to know. somewhere along the line, on its way through the editing process, a decision was made that started with the ending and worked its way backwards. everything that supported the ending was kept, and everything which meandered along the way, taking the scenic route instead of the interstate, was cut. which would be totally fine, if this wasn't the third movie in a trilogy. essentially, it was edited as a movie in which (don't say i didn't warn you about spoilers) will turner and elizabeth swann get married, and nothing whatsoever like a sequel to a movie in which jack and elizabeth's compasses are all kinds of broken for one another. [yeah. i'm a closet sparrowbethian. wanna make something of it?] or like a sequel to a movie that was all about escaping the kraken. or like a sequel to a movie where norrington was posited as the perfect redemptive anti-hero to work with governor swann to disentangle the royal navy from its east india trading company overlords. or like a sequel to a movie that ended with the pirates heading off to world's end to get jack back, simply because it was a perfectly good idea on its own merits.
pulling this story down to 168 minutes meant they had to make some hard choices about what to keep and what to throw away. in the end, it's still a brilliant tale -- but when you look at some of the irrelevant filler that made the cut (i'm looking at you, One-Eyed McCrabInPants) and hold it up next to some severe deficits in storytelling, to say nothing of editing . . . in the end, it's a great third pirates movie. but as a conclusion to a saga, it falls terribly, terribly short.
unfortunately, like a plane needing to lighten the weight of its cargo hold before takeoff, so many loose ends have been discarded rather than resolved, there's no way a second trilogy, much less a fourth movie, could possibly conclude things properly. honestly, they should have looked at all of the material they had and decided to go for a tetralogy. it's not like we wouldn't have shown up. but, no. instead of the satisfying taste of a roast that's been done right by a crock pot, we're left with rushed. microwaved slices both undercooked and burnt, with a faintly nauseating dorm kitchen ramen-and-popcorn aftertaste.
where was i. ah, yes. singapore. if you spend any amount of time in the media/tv section of borders or barnes and noble looking through the illustrated coffee table books about the making of this film, you start to realize that it really is like the ride that inspired it -- a series of gorgeous vignettes, with only the loosest paper-thin connective tissue leading you from one scene to the next. singapore is lavishly illustrated in the making-of books, with detailed pencil sketches and lush pastels and all manner of fabulous artwork that went into the pre-visualization of the set, the scenes, the storyboarding -- the filmmakers obviously loved getting the chance to finally show us singapore, after hinting about it over the last few films.
i'm still not sure why they needed to. the pirates come before sao feng and say they need a ship and a crew. so, what, they walked to singapore? from the caribbean? and since when did pirates ask for a ship? ever?
true, they also say they need navigational charts to make it to (or, as it happens, back from) the land of the dead. then again, in the last movie we were told they simply needed "a captain who knows dose waters." but neither barbossa nor tia dalma seem to be any help at all when it comes to escaping the land of the dead itself. i'm getting ahead of myself again, but the more you start to think about it, the more it unravels. the filmmakers try their best to turn "hoist the colours" into a magical subpoena, making pieces of eight everywhere into something like the owls in the harry potter films, ringing a magical tone that only real pirates can hear (or something). this is apparently planned out by lord cutler beckett, who ominously says "finally" at the news that the pirates have started singing in the prologue, as though he knew all along that the way to summon the brethren court was to kill a bunch of pirates wholesale until one of them finally started singing the song. but in beckett's very next scene he doesn't seem to know the significance of the pieces of eight at all. it's a sun-addled mess from the start, and it spends several hours only getting messier.
the singapore sequence is very, very pretty. we're reintroduced to everybody, the song gets a few more lyrics, we get to see some funny/pretty/jaw-dropping bits involving keira in a robe, (one review pointed out that she seems to be carrying a "really big gun in her boot"), we're introduced to sao feng (for all the good it will do), and there's some fun swordfightery to be had from all sides. plus, sailing past a town on fire was one of the big moments from the ride that was still as yet unrealized. then will and sao feng start scheming ("if you want to make a deal with beckett, you need what i offer," will emphatically says, without actually mentioning what he's offering) and the film starts to turn up the inscrutable.
the flying dutchman atomizes a couple of random pirate ships, but nobody we know is on them, so who cares. (one is forced to wonder where all of the pirates they were hanging in the prologue were coming from, given that it takes a few scenes before jones is ordered to leave a few survivors on the ships he takes). newly promoted admiral norrington is returned the sword that will turner made him for his promotion ceremony as commodore, and governor swann gets to say a line and look sad.
there's a cut scene that should have gone here that's absolutely magnificent. nothing is covered in this conversation that particularly drives the plot or that's not able to be picked up by the other scenes -- which is why they cut it, one imagines, as it's mostly about other characters being given information we either already have, that we learn later elsewhere, or that we know isn't true. but, oh, what we miss in its absence. all we can hope for is that they actually filmed it and that it makes it onto the dvd. it's essentially the scene that swann refers to later, when he says that he discovered the secret about the heart of davy jones and the dead man's chest. what we don't see in the film is how it all plays out. jones tells the governor that elizabeth is dead, taken by the kraken. swann whirls on norrington, demanding to know if he knew. the chest is opened, and swann takes a bayonet to the heart. he's warned of the consequences, and is ready to make the kill himself, when norrington, in shock over the news of elizabeth's death, stops the governor, saying "elizabeth would not have wanted this."
given what could have been, it's basically christopher lee in return of the king all over again.
the pirates really do sail to the ends of the earth. i point this out because it's something the last movie suggested we were going to see, but this time they actually deliver. the monkey shivers. tia dalma declares that davy jones' locker is a place of eternal punishment, and apparently jumping into the kraken's mouth has led to jack sparrow being "taken, body and soul." i'm assuming the black spot has something to do with it, because the kraken takes a hell of a lot of people in dead man's chest but jack's the only one who's apparently only "mostly" dead. as for the black pearl itself . . . oh hell, your guess is as good as mine. maybe because it was resurrected once already? maybe because a pirate lord's ship has something approximating a soul, and can thereby join its master in the afterlife? (!?) maybe because the black spot marks not only the person, but his or her effects, including their ship? [this is the only explanation that remotely covers why the kraken didn't leave the pearl at once and head immediately for the longboat jack was in when he first tried to make a break for it at the end of dead man's chest, so, sure, what the hell, let's run with it.]
then we come back to the endeavour for more bits with jones and beckett. apparently knowing about the chest means governor swann isn't valuable any more, in spite of the fact that everybody in the caribbean knows about the chest at this point, and in spite of that whole (somewhat crucial) plot point about needing his "authority as governor" and his "influence in london" to get any support from the royal navy. it's there because the better scene isn't, and it doesn't make any sense, but by this point (half an hour in) there's no better time to start getting used to that sort of thing. and, hey, murtogg and mullroy are back! as east india trading company agents! which serves . . . no real purpose whatsoever. i mean, nice to see them getting work and all, but they don't have nearly enough to do. and since every other EITC agent is a disposable red shirt blue jacket, there will be many an uncomfortable moment ahead in the battle scenes to come, as characters that look exactly like characters we sort of like are mowed down in battle.
then comes The Waterfall Scene. and honestly, i'm torn. on the one hand, yay, direct reference to the ride. and in case you didn't know the ride goes over a waterfall (okay, it goes down a slight hill, but it does it in darkness, and when you're going on the ride for the first time as a kid it's pretty much the coolest thing ever), barbossa quotes it directly: "Ye may not survive to pass this way again... And these be the last friendly words ye hear." and in case that wasn't enough of a telegraph, there's a series of audio clips taken directly from the ride itself after the ship falls over the side ("Hoist your colors, ye bloomin' cockroaches!" "Shift yer cargo, dearie, show 'em yer larboard side!" "Dead men tell no tales!"). and it's a fun scene, especially watching barbossa laughing his head off, exactly like he's on a ride at an amusement park or something. it's like absolutely nothing we've seen before. [or at least not since erik the viking.] turns out they didn't need a ship and a crew from sao feng, they just needed a few barrels and a couple of oars. and it's bothersome to watch regular old live humans fall hundreds, if not thousands, of feet off a waterfall into the land of the dead and survive, even though their ship is smashed to pieces. don't tell me, let me guess. "tia dalma's magic protected them." or something. i know, i know, "just repeat to yourself 'it's just a show'; you should really just relax." but damnit, at least the aztec gold tried to make sense. there were still rules. the undead pirates obeyed gravity. we've landed very solidly in the land of "just making this shit up as we go along," and it's insulting.
for just a moment there, i had a sinking feeling that davy jones' locker would turn out to be nothing but footage of the actors in modern dress simply waiting in line to board the ride itself. but no, they had something even more surreal waiting for us.
multiple johnny depps! representing a manifestation of his fractured consciousness! my GOD, man!
stunned, STUNNED i am by the creativity! nobody's EVER THOUGHT OF DOING THAT BEFORE!
so. anyway. the locker.
i get what they were trying to do. malkovich malkovich, malkovich malkovich malkovich. nicely quirky musical cues, combined with some straight-out-of-sundance experimental film sequences. the novelty value alone is a worthwhile effort.
and i can even appreciate tia dalma reaching in with her magical crab powers and extracting the black pearl from its landlocked berth, figuring that she'd drag jack right out along with it. and the crabs are cute.
but no amount of reconciliatory tylenol will help explain how you escape davy jones' locker by just getting in a ship that also happened to be there at the time and then sailing away from it, or even sailing away from it and then flipping your ship upside down. it's pitched as some sort of custom-built hell dimension reachable only by kraken or waterfall, this iteration of which is specifically designed to torment jack. yet apparently a parachute and a kayak is all you need for a roundtrip ticket.
adorable watching the two captains go all "DUCK season! RABBIT season!" on each other, though, i have to admit.
still in the eternal hell dimension with no wind in it, the black pearl sails into the sunset. jack and elizabeth manage to not quite resolve anything, and then the crew finds themselves being passed by hundreds of dead people, drifting and/or floating back behind them towards . . . that desolate beach that didn't have anybody on it. or something. maybe they each get their own beaches. this would be a really awesome time for barbossa to weigh in on the whole afterlife thing, but he just tells the rest of the crew that "it's best just let them be." tia dalma seems really quite pissed that davy jones isn't doing his job (which will be kind of ironic in about an hour).
then comes the big tragic scene between elizabeth and her father, which is also noteworthy because jack sparrow's gentle comment ("elizabeth. we're not back.") and elizabeth's reaction shot is the closest damn thing they'll have to any actual damn moment of genuine damn connection together in the whole damn movie. seriously. the emotional climax of this soggy little trilogy gets NO RESOLUTION WHATSOEVER. not that i'm bitter.
governor swann delivers exposition we'll hear about two or three more times over the course of the movie, and then drifts off into the afterlife. the tony award-winning character actor once called the hamlet of his generation does yeoman's work, so to speak, with the seven damn lines this movie gives him, but the tears in your eyes are still likelier to be the tragedy of what they could have done with his character instead of what they ended up doing to him. elizabeth gets some tasty, tasty scenery to chew, and does an admirable job of it before wilting in a way that's, frankly, completely out of character by this point. it looks more like they just ran out of lines for her to say. and then, as will asks if there's a way to interrupt the process, tia dalma shakes her head and says "him at peace." is it even possible for a murder victim to be at peace? did barbossa simply have more to live for than swann? and is he going to start demonstrating that anytime soon?
in what's apparently the end of the next day, the crew's out of water, out of rum, and tia dalma helpfully informs them that they're moments away from being trapped forever in the land of the dead. since the sun hadn't yet set when they were underway the day before, you apparently get until the second sunset after you start sailing to escape the land of the dead, so lucky thing you brought a voodoo priestess along. except, and i hate to say this, as magical arcane yoda archetypes go, tia dalma kind of sucks. if it doesn't involve crabs, she pretty much either snarls or looks befuddled through most of the movie. given that the whole "travel to the land of the dead to bring jack back" venture was her idea in the first place, one is left with the distressing impression of the roommate's girlfriend who demanded everyone get up early to drive several hours to get to bonnaroo in time for the opening act, but didn't realize until standing in front of the will call booth that she forgot the credit card the tickets were charged with.
then jack starts up a conversation with miniature versions of himself on his shoulders, which is also completely original and not at all derivative and we've never seen anything like that before either.
jack then decodes the map in the nick of time, and gets the rest of the crew to help him capsize the ship.
the bad news is that this scene really is as stupid as it sounds. but the good news is that you're not likely to care, because they're finally up and moving and running around and no longer getting all emo on one another, for a brief, blessed interlude, even a relentlessly improbable one. i've cued "up is down" roughly 30 times on my ipod in the past week or so because it's the single perkiest musical sequence on the whole soundtrack, a whirlwind of a jig. and given that we're only about an hour in to what's almost a three hour movie, this explains a lot as to why the tomatometer is stuck at a lousy 47%. the crew runs back and forth on the bridge of the pearl, looking nothing so much like a pack of kids in pirate garb at recess on a giant jungle gym. it's a really fun scene to watch, even as the whole left side of your brain is wincing and going "what? wait . . . wait . . . WHAT?!?"
whatever; sunset is now sunrise; the ship flips; the sea and the sky change places; gravity reverses itself; the world is turned inside out; they're all alive again. fine. time for the mexican standoff moment that will in no way remind you of every other movie that has a mexican standoff moment. plus dialogue: blah blah brethren court blah blah beckett blah blah jones. what makes this one a keeper is the evil undead pirate monkey (with clothes) pulling a gun on cotton's parrot. it may damn well be my new very favorite moment in film.
at will's suggestion, they make their way to The Island With The Dead Kraken On It, which isn't at all suspicious or improbable. jack and barbossa, for one single moment in the whole series, get to have a palaver like old friends, pirate to pirate, ("the world used to be a bigger place" "the world's still the same. there's just less in it"), and you suddenly wish there was more time to take the scenic route.
then the giant metaphorical storytelling corkboard in the sky with the index cards on it that's supposed to be keeping the story straight somehow gets turned into a rube goldberg contraption involving yarn that was left alone too long with a couple of cats.
sao feng's men suddenly turn on the crew, bringing everyone back onto the black pearl. will has led a mutiny in order to hand jack to sao feng in exchange for the pearl, but elizabeth has been chained with the rest. will demands her freedom as sao feng hands jack off to cutler beckett (huh huh huh. i said "hands jack off."), and sao feng finds the deal he had with beckett being altered by mercer just as he's altering the deal he had with will. it's all very lando and vader in cloud city, except sped up too fast to actually keep track of anything.
mercer finally shuts out sao feng, leaving him with barbossa to get all enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend with him. barbossa dresses up elizabeth in calypso gift wrap to get sao feng to point his triceratops horns away from the pearl and towards the endeavor, as jack agrees to sell out the brethren court in exchange for getting his account with jones settled. the compass gets tossed back and forth a few times, too, since it was the main plot point of the last movie and SAG rules says it gets at least three closeups plus residuals in the sequel.
again: whatever. it's all just a bunch of people standing around talking, double- and triple-crossing each other entirely because the scriptwriters decided the aztec gold thing was way too straightforward last time around. or maybe they just hate us; the jury's still out.
also, the deleted scene to end all deleted scenes takes place in the middle of this sequence, just as cutler beckett offers jack a commission (verbatim, from the novelization):
"So I am offering you a job. In the employ of the East India Trading Company. Working for me."
"We've been down that road before, haven't we? And we both know how you get when your advances are spurned." (jack holds up the brand on his wrist)
"I had contracted with you to deliver cargo on my behalf. You chose to liberate it."
"People aren't cargo, mate."
let that sink in a bit. then realize what extremely stylistic (yet somewhat incomprehensible) scene from the second movie suddenly gets thrown into sharp relief with this context to redefine it:
it doesn't do anything for the action at hand. and if anything, it doesn't just completely scrub away jack's moral ambiguity; it damn near canonizes him. i don't know if they filmed that bit or not; having it cut from the film is inconsequential. but i want i want i want.
blah blah calypso, blah blah pirate court, blah blah deals within deals.
elizabeth goes off on the empress, and the black pearl gets to do some grand cannonade and sword action until jack sparrow gets another chance to swing by the yardarm after disabling the endeavour. it's not that it's a bad sequence, really; but good luck getting it all squared away as it unfolds without seeing it a second or third time. on the other hand, it's a scene like this that truly makes a second viewing worthwhile; freed from the burden of having to keep track of the back-and-forth, you can just sit back and enjoy the fun parts. jack throws will in the brig, and the ships part company as night falls.
on board the empress, we get to see sao feng's pimp strut. it's a groovy scene, all the way up to that whole sao-feng-turns-rapist-and-then-gets-pointlessly-killed bit, as the flying dutchman attacks. elizabeth is handed the singapore pirate lord's piece of eight and gets named captain (whatever; it's disney) and she goes to the bridge and promptly runs into norrington. their reunion probably could have gone better; her father's death and norrington's complicity in the Evils That Bewigged Men Do get thrown in his face, and, (in a gift to fic writers everywhere), she elects to spend the night in a cell with a bunch of chinese pirates she's just met rather than in the admiral's quarters. she then goes about tracking down bootstrap, who's deep in the process of losing his humanity as well as his mind. we get more exposition about the nature of the dead man's chest, in case it was missed before.
then it's time to play Hey Kids! Guess What Seagulls Do To Dead Bodies! (personally, i can't wait for the happy meal connect-the-dots diagram.) will and jack scheme a bit on the black pearl, and in retrospect this is pretty much exactly the point where they lost me.
"And you're willing to cut out your heart and bind yourself to the Dutchman? Forever?"
"No, mate. I'm free forever. Free to sail the seas beyond the edges of the map. Free from death itself."
"You have to do the job, though, Jack. You have to ferry souls to the next world. Or end up just like Jones."
"Ew. I don't have the face for tentacles. But immortal has to count for something, eh?"
the second line up there is pure, unfiltered jack. but the fourth line? it looks like jack. it even sounds like jack. but that? right up there? not jack. here, let me illustrate:
JACK
NOT JACK
one of the things that the cognitive dissonance of at world's end did for me once and for all (re: its lack of connectivity to what came before it) is galvanize my understanding of what was going through jack sparrow's mind when he jumped into the kraken's mouth. they stuffed dead man's chest full to the brim with red herrings. his rings. his baubles. his hat. the things he shoplifted from tia dalma's shack. i spent a nonzero amount of thought contemplating just what trinket it must have been that let him know without question that this wasn't really death he was facing. there must have been something. it's in his nature to run from death, not to heroically embrace it, therefore, q.e.d., he must have had an ace up his sleeve.
turns out, not so much. he just died. it was a stupid, pointless death after all, and he didn't have any hidden magic trick to send him anywhere but his own special hell.
which means that his bravery was genuine, and not an act. he faced his death with the bravura we probably would have expected from him on any other day if he was just holding his nose and jumping back onto the synchronicity highway, counting on his raw charisma to save him. but this time was different. he really was facing his real death, no bluff, no quarter. but he did it with panache. he even did it with dignity.
and now we're to understand that he would rather spend eternity notfree, doing a job -- a job-- because he was suddenly, having been there, afraid of death? simply, no. i deny. categorically.
not that i'm against character arcs. but getting two-thirds and US$1.7 billion dollars into one of the most entertaining trilogies in the history of trilogies, and then turning around and ignoring all of the unresolved character development otherwise left hanging in order to saddle the most undiluted trickster archetype to come along in eons, the hero of heroes, peter-pan-in-dreadlocks, with a mid-life crisis? just . . . meh.
notjack sails back off towards the brethren court, and will and the compass are left bobbing in the path of the endeavour. good thing, too, because if beckett hadn't given the compass back to jack, he'd . . . now be able to use it to follow notjack, who's going to the brethren court . . . which is what beckett's trying to find. again, the more you think about it, the more it unravels.
then, suddenly, it's norrington's turn to be heroic! finally! we get the action scene we've been waiting for ever since he disentangled himself from a water wheel way back in the day. he finally gets a real chance to utterly redeem himself by hatching a complex plan worthy of a man of letters that was at the top of his class in tactical strategy, involving getting word to the british soldiers still loyal to him so they can meet . . . and, i'm lying. he opens a stupid door and then he gets killed. stupidly. i mean, there's bits there that are genuinely nifty. there's just enough strain on elizabeth's relationship with will at this moment that when she says "james, come with me," it sounds like all the cards are at least potentially on the table. his is a sacrifice which is not unaccompanied by genuine grief on his part; he knows damn well what he's giving up, and he also knows why there isn't any choice. and he gets to die with his boots on, his eyes open, and his sword in his hand (with the other end sticking out of his enemy's torso, albeit fruitlessly), in the name of honor and duty and all that other stuff he always seemed so proud of -- those moments he was clean-shaven and sober, anyway. and, hey, he gets to deliver what may not be anywhere near the kiss of a lifetime, but it was certainly the kiss of his life. so, there's that. but a chance encounter with bootstrap bill the lobotomized watch-pirate is a crummy, awful way to die, any way you slice it.
will turner's sword gets passed, as it were, to davy jones. and then, without the admiral's mitigating influence, the dutchman crew kill all but a dozen EITC agents, who are holding down the fort with mercer and the heart and the chest and a few choice tabletop cannons in the captain's cabin. it's very, very important that you completely forget this fact in another hour or so, when the flying dutchman is back in combat and there suddenly seem to be an unlimited supply of agents for the others to fight. think of them like the bullets in james bond's gun. (or jack sparrow's, for that matter.)
both davy jones and mercer each sort of answered to the admiral when he was alive, but they were otherwise both unhinged bloodthirsty misogynist sociopaths in their own right. and now they suddenly find themselves with a lot of guns, a supernaturally powerful ship, and a bunch of escaped prisoners with a female captain something like three, four hundred yards astern, tops. they turn around, easily catch up to the empress, and blow her out of the water, saving elizabeth swann from drowning at the last minute. given what happened to her later at mercer's hands, and then at davy jones', and then his crew, her last sane thoughts were prayers for a death that would never come, cursing jack sparrow and will turner with every sobbing breath for letting her get trapped in such a terrible fate.
oh, wait, that didn't happen. but we're given no bloody reason for it not to. the battle-ravaged empress just magically gets away from the flying dutchman and winds up at the brethren court, because the heirlooms of the pirate lords are apparently also homing devices. or something.
the pearl brings its crew to shipwreck cove, and barbossa reveals, ninety minutes in, that tia dalma is actually calypso. you know. for those who were still trying to figure out who the sea goddess trapped in human form could possibly be. since we already know it's not elizabeth. and there are only two women in the cast.
more wheelings and dealings on the endeavour between beckett, jones, and will turner, as we learn that calypso is the one davy jones was in love with. since we already know it's not elizabeth. and there are only two women in the cast. davy jones reveals that he was the one who showed the first brethren court how to bind calypso, and then everyone in the room immediately forgets that davy jones just said he'd been to the first brethren court (and yes, barbossa does stand at the table and say that the first court met "at this very spot"). thankfully, the fact that they don't have anyone among them who knows where the brethren court meets doesn't matter, because will's also got jack's compass.
i swear, screenwriting like this just makes me want to punch a baby. what the HELL, man?
we then crane in on what's either a really detailed miniature or a cgi rendering of ewok village minas tirith shipwreck cove, a dazzling island constructed entirely of wrecked ships. so their "nigh-impenetrable fortress" . . . is composed of driftwood.
look, i'm not remembering things wrong, here, am i? didn't the first movie at least try to make a little bit of sense? aztec gold, cursed pirates, moonlight shows their skeletal form, blood to be repaid, right? it wasn't THAT complicated and/or ludicrous, (at least, certainly not in hindsight), was it?
finally, the brethren court is convened. in addition to notjack sparrow, pirate lord of the caribbean, (so we establish right away that being a pirate "lord" has all of the authority, power, and status of a cardboard burger king crown), there's barbossa, pirate lord of the caspian sea (shh! don't tell him it's landlocked), ammand the corsair, pirate lord of the black sea, capitane chevelle, pirate lord of the mediterranean sea, mistress ching, pirate lord of the pacific ocean, gentleman jocard, pirate lord of the atlantic ocean, sri sumbhajee, pirate lord of the indian ocean, eduardo villanueva, pirate lord of the adriatic sea, and . . . elizabeth turner, pirate lord of the south china sea.
as the star trek: the next generation episode "best of both worlds, part ii" painfully reminds us, a cliffhanger is only as good as the sum of its parts. "so tell me . . . what's become of my ship?" a line that, prior to about three weeks ago, sent chills up my spine for pretty much an entire year there, finds its conclusion in . . . a board meeting. that's why barbossa was raised from the dead. that's why the whole first half of the movie happened. that's why they needed to drag jack back from davy jones' locker. that's why james norrington and governor weatherby swann and sao feng had to die. for a damn board meeting.
on the other hand, at least there's no powerpoint presentation. the pieces of eight are collected. (surprise! barbossa's is actually ragetti's wooden eye! surprise! notjack's is actually the coin he's got hanging from the top of his bandanna -- hey, maybe if they make eight or nine of these we'll learn what all of his baubles do, like the various compartments on the chassis of r2-d2!) elizabeth shows up. proposals and counter-proposals are suggested. a fight breaks out.
then we go to the brig of the black pearl, where barbossa has locked up tia dalma. her music box is echoed by the appearance of davy jones and his music box. when faced with her own culpability in why davy jones is no longer ferrying the dead like he's supposed to, the point she was bitterly complaining about back in the locker, she just shrugs it off with a capricious smile and says "tis my nature." she touches him and he briefly becomes human again before changing back to his cephelapodishness. this is actually a nicely done moment. it looks as though he's going to kill her himself, but can't quite bring himself to do it. so love conquers all in the end. or something. even though there was a deal on the table between will and davy jones and beckett a couple of scenes ago that seemed to conclude with will telling jones where to find calypso in exchange for his father's freedom and his and elizabeth's safety, it all pretty much seems to have been forgotten about. tia dalma swears that this court (which has been pretty much established as not anything but the inheritors of the trinkets of the first court, e.g. "there's not been a gathering like this in our lifetime") will understand how cruel she can be before she kills them all. boy. the follow-through on that should be delicious, huh? can't wait for that scene.
back to the brethren court, because, hell, why not. barbossa stops the fight with a gunshot, notjack goes on about cuttlefish for a while, they bicker before the court, and then barbossa summons the keeper of the code. this is one of the better stunt casting maneuvers i've seen in a while; keith richards was reportedly drunk off his ass when he filmed his scenes, but if you're going to play mr. sparrow, that's kind of in the job description. the dog with the keys improbably shows up, having successfully escaped cannibal island, to which teague just shrugs and says "sea turtles, mate."
there's a lesson in that. we'll come back to it.
a vote is called to declare a pirate king, and notjack completely interferes with the democratic process by throwing a second vote behind elizabeth. voila, she's the pirate king. it's somewhere around this point that you start to wonder if maybe this whole damn saga has been constructed simply to give disney another strong female protagonist they can put on t-shirts and insert into parades and build an animated tv show around. and maybe that's all it needs to be. keith richards breaks a guitar string, and elizabeth declares war. (bloodthirsty li'l minx, ain't she?)
notjack and teague have their own kind of father-son bonding moment, which is its own philosophical touchstone:
"What? You seen it all, done it all. You survived. That's the trick, in' it? To survive?"
"It's not just about living forever, Jackie. The trick is living with yourself forever."
and notjack gets a shrunken head. (seriously. he's wearing it on his belt the next time we see him.)
morning. the field at agincourt. i mean, the fogged-in waters off the shores of nowhere in particular. the fleet discovers that they face a massive armada, and cotton's parrot flies off for shore because the writers were tired of coming up with new bits of dialogue for him. (i'm not making this up; it's in their interview on boxofficemojo.com.) notjack calls for parlay, and the soundtrack improbably jumps from orchestral wagnerian strings to heavy van halenian guitar.
elizabeth, notjack, and barbossa meet will, beckett, and davy jones on a sandbar between the two fleets. davy jones stands in a barrel of seawater, which is funny until you try to parse the idea that the whole "can only come ashore once every ten years" thing has a ridiculously broad loophole. and, what, did beckett and will use the fireman's carry when they moved him over from the boat? o rly?
anyway. blah blah you'll all die blah blah no, YOU'LL all die, blah blah double cross blah blah triple cross blah blah you killed my father blah blah inigo montoya blah. barbossa slices notjack's piece of eight off his braid (if all they needed this whole time was the damn trinket, couldn't they have just sent a single crab into the locker to steal it from . . . oh never mind), will and notjack trade places, and davy jones stares down notjack, who wilts like a kid facing the meanest bully on the playground (see NOT JACK, above). "do you fear death?" "you have no idea." fortunately, that's not jack. if it were jack i'd be standing up in the theater and shouting at the screen over what they'd done to the character who had once stared into the maw of the kraken itself. but notjack? piffle. who cares.
will, elizabeth, and barbossa return to the black pearl, and davy jones gets a piggyback ride from notjack back to the dinghy from his barrel. davy jones brings notjack aboard the flying dutchman and promptly enacts his revenge, supernaturally extracting the oath from him that binds notjack to the ship for the next hundred years. no, wait. i mean he throws him in the brig. ha. listen to me, all "and then the supervillain shot james bond a whole bunch of times in the face." right. THAT not real.
we get some more time with the minijacks, who have now returned to original size, and also a look at barnaclejack, who likes to take out his brain and lick it. one of the minijacks extracts a peanut from notjack's dreadlocks and eats it. clearly, the screenwriters have decided that we have been bad and we need to be punished.
back on the pearl, barbossa performs the spell that releases calypso from her tia dalma shell. it's at this point in the movie that you have to remember that they had a budget of US$300 MILLION DOLLARS, and that included things like writing the script down on pieces of paper and having those pieces of paper read by people who have been to movies before and presumably had some idea of what works and what doesn't.
i've been over the film backwards and forwards and i can still find no reason whatsoever for the crew of the black pearl to try to hold down tia dalma with ropes. their only goal in this scene is twofold: 1. set calypso free, and 2. don't piss her off. and yet, after they've enabled the ritual that releases the sea goddess, they still hold onto the ropes. it's just stupid. even after it turns into the attack of the 50 foot voodoo priestess and she suddenly goes from being held down by eight people who walked her upstairs from the brig while holding a few dozen feet of line to being tied to the mast and a bunch of cleats and held down by dozens of ropes hundreds of feet in length. really, really stupid. and the ropes not only lengthen ridiculously, but thicken. like her modesty-concealing-to-the-bitter-end dress, they're apparently made of the same insta-grow superhero fabric as the incredible hulk's pants. stupid, stupid, stupid.
and how is this climax rendered? [remembering all the while that it's being produced under the auspices of the same production team that brought us davy jones, a cgi effect so realistic they had to make a point of informing critics it wasn't a prosthetic.] with utterly craptastic pre-cgi-era front-projection and rear-projection technology so atrocious it literally looks like a demo reel that never made it through final processing. remember the last time we saw an attack of a 50 foot woman? it was dude, where's my car. AND THEIR SPECIAL EFFECTS WERE BETTER.
and when barbossa asks for mercy, she cuts loose with...some sort of unintelligible noise in response. if it was supposed to be english, the filmmakers just abysmally failed. if it wasn't supposed to be english, it damn well should have been subtitled.
then she turns into crabs. god damnit, i can't even believe i'm actually writing this. the big effects payoff to what's supposed to have been the wrap-up conclusion of one of my favorite movie sagas in years, and it's a fifty-foot woman turning into thousands of crabs and then disappearing into the sea.
then of course comes elizabeth's agincourt moment, when she stands before the black pearl crew and galvanizes the entire fleet into battle. holy cow. nine pirate lords commanding dozens of pirate ships. we weren't just seeing a half-dozen ĭ-grē'jəs ethnic stereotypes flouting about a board meeting for no reason but for the funny accents; oh no. a scene or two ago they had just been at each other's throats, the chaos of years of hostility, and now elizabeth swann the pirate king (i know, right?) had magnetized their battle compasses against a common foe. we would see french pirate elbow-to-elbow with spanish and turkish and chinese and japanese and hindi pirate. their own styles of combat, their own strengths and weaknesses, all coming to bear against the armada of the east india trading company and the flying dutchman. a battle royale unlike any ever witnessed. my GOD, it was going to be awesome.
kidding. the brethren court raise their flags dramatically and then they sit back and have a big multi-ethnic potluck barbecue while they put their feet up and let the black pearl do all of the actual fighting. but barbossa was quick to fill the hull with spare pirates from the other ships, so that they'd at least have the sweeps at the ready (remember? the oars from the first movie that made mincemeat out of the interceptor?) when it came down to a matter of speed deciding the advantage in combat.
kidding. honestly, it's like they didn't even watch the first two movies before writing this one.
if you've seen any press about this film, you've probably heard there's a whirlpool in it. and to be fair, it really is a spectacular sequence, watching the two ships go at it from opposing sides of a gigantic maelstrom.
it starts raining, but it's not just rain, it's "i've been released and i'm very, very angry" calypso rain. at least that's the way davy jones reacts to it. something interesting happens to barbossa when calypso is freed. he starts to relax. it's a subtle thing, but once his primary task of convening the court and releasing calypso is complete, he metaphorically rolls up his sleeves and starts to have fun again. and there's fun -- at least, his kind of fun -- to be had in spades, what with the whirlpool and the attacking pirates and everything.
it takes notjack a really, really long time to remember that the way to break out of a half-barrel pin hinged door is through the right leverage. he makes it out of the brig and gets to the cabin, letting murtogg and mullroy distract themselves while he makes off with the chest. meanwhile, davy jones gives mercer the cthulu treatment (which really is awesome, in a squicktastic sort of way) and gets the key. they meet at the halfway point, jones picks two completely different pronunciations for the word "bird" ("bud" and "beard") which completely spoils notjack's "migrate" pun, as notjack kicks a line free that hurls him to one of the higher yardarms, and jones uses his pass-through-matter trick as a high-speed elevator to face off with notjack.
then something happens. it's really quite breathtaking. notjack draws his sword . . . and becomes jack again. all at once. he holds his ground, is the big thing, and offers to set davy jones free. jones responds by saying his freedom "was forfeit long ago," and then attacks. they fight. at the top of a yardarm. on a ship in a fierce cannon battle in the middle of a gigantic maelstrom.
. . . .
suddenly, i'm on board again. suddenly, jack's back. suddenly, i'm watching the most pirate-y thing i've ever seen, and it's dazzling, and it's spectacular, and absolutely none of the egregious problems of the last two hours of movie matter, because it's all been what was needed to bring us to this moment. i'm watching the swordfight to end all swordfights, and it's awesome. it really, truly is.
the crews swing across the gulf to each other's ships. elizabeth and will spontaneously have possibly the most awesome wedding scene ever, each fighting off one opponent after another (you'll feel better if you pretend they're all undead pirates, even the human-looking ones in EITC uniforms) while barbossa officiates (while also fighting off opponents of his own). their kiss is one of those fantastic bubbles of tranquility that makes everything around them unfold in slow motion, and it's also pretty damn awesome. then they go back to the awesome yardarm swordfight, and pintel and ragetti awesomely shoot the monkey from a cannon, and bootstrap attacks his son, and all of the pieces -- will, jack, elizabeth, davy jones, bootstrap, will's sword, bootstrap's knife, the key, the chest -- spiral closer and closer together and it all starts to unfold like clockwork. awesome, awesome clockwork.
the actual resolution is almost completely satisfactory. words simply don't do it justice. it needs to be seen, and it needs to be seen on a big screen.
yes, i'm recommending the movie after all. surprise!
there are still problems before the credits roll. jack's escape from the flying dutchman ridiculously involves inventing the parasail. multogg and mullroy make an entertaining "when in rome" transformation, but it's also the final nail in the coffin of the royal navy. the maelstrom ends instantly and the sun comes out and the insane sea goddess is never seen or heard from again, which is a reprehensibly sloppy way of concluding her character arc. beckett's undoing is . . . well, it's really well photographed, but i wouldn't call it satisfactory. the armada and the pirate fleet pretty much just leave the battlefield without really resolving anything in the long-term, except in that "our champion beat up your champion" sort of way. which is, i suppose, good enough for a disney movie.
but the final resolutions are just one big awesome bucket of rainbow-sprinkled nifty. everyone says their goodbyes in just the right way, from pintel's "goodbye, poppet" to elizabeth's farewell kiss to the toast between gibbs and jack. while elizabeth's happy ending is bittersweet, it's still a pitch-perfect wrap-up, all the way around. at the end of the movie, absolutely everybody is placed just where they ought to be.
[the screenwriters have been quick to point out that the ending they "really wanted" had will turner being freed from the curse if his true love was waiting for him after ten years. which was why davy jones had been driven mad, you see, as calypso's absence at the ten year mark doomed him for an eternity of servitude aboard the dutchman. they claim the scene explaining this was "cut for time." sounds good, except it's not in the novelization either. which means it was never in the script. i call shenanigans.]
i'm sort of left with the conclusion that an attempt to understand the saga is itself an exercise in existentialism, or possibly just futility. in the end, no amount of effort involved in trying to make sense of it all will really lead anywhere, so just hang back, trust the sea turtles, bring the fun hat, pop some popcorn and try to enjoy the shiny. just like life.
[i'm literally out of room, at least as far as livejournal's concerned. there may be more . . . later.]
pirates of the caribbean: the curse of the black pearl exceeded absolutely everybody's expectations, especially when held up next to the country bears and the haunted mansion. it was good, it was deep, it was depp. and there was interesting story and much pretty and a great deal of fun to be had by all.
pirates of the caribbean: dead man's chest enhanced the palette and broadened the scope of the first film considerably. there were extraordinary new villains, including a freaking sea monster, and an extraordinarily intricate story in the telling.
pirates of the caribbean: at world's end has this really awesome scene where a monkey pulls a gun on a parrot.
[i'm not kidding. i spoil the living hell out of this movie under the cut. it's not just themes this time around; i get into the missteps of the filmmakers, and very few stones are left uncrabbed. do NOT say i didn't warn you.]
do you remember what it was like? in july of 2006, we didn't know what was coming next, but we were all pretty sure of one thing: in 46 weeks, we were in for a hell of a concluding chapter, and when it got here it was going to be awesome.
For too long I've been parched with thirst and unable to quench it. Too long I've been starving to death and haven't died. I feel
nothing -- not the wind on my face nor the spray of the sea, nor the warmth of a woman's flesh.
first and foremost: barbossa was back. sorry, let me rephrase that: BARBOSSA WAS BACK. holy. shit. one of the most magnificent bad guys of all time, and he wasn't just not dead any more, he was alive. eating apples and everything. one could only imagine the falstaffian indulgences he would be up to in the sequel, given how long he'd been denied worldly pleasures. the obvious yet inevitable scene, where he makes a pass at elizabeth, would alone be worth the price of admission. and what would a mind like his have to say about dying, having made his way back to the land of the living? the possibilities were just phenomenally fascinating. one thing was certain: it was going to be awesome.
My story . . . it's exactly the same as your story, just one chapter behind.
then there was the delightful smackdown that norrington would inevitably deploy on the east india trading company. he was perfectly placed, the anti-hero that's got just a little too much sympathy for pirates (in spite of himself), even as he's placed in a position of command in the halliburtoned royal navy. who better to restore the honor of the crown, probably with murtogg and mullroy's help? it wasn't too obvious what role he'd finally play in the climax of the third film, but there was no way it wouldn't be a spectacular one, given how much time and effort they'd spent taking a rather petty bad guy from the first movie and turning him into a genuinely interesting, conflicted foil in the second. while it might be a bit much to have yet another "i think we can give them one day's head start" sort of ending, he was definitely one of the better aces any screenwriters, (or at least any worth, as they say, their salt), could possibly have up their respective sleeves. it was going to be awesome.
Governor Swann, still. Do you think I wear this wig to keep my head warm?
and by restoration of the crown's proper role in the caribbean, i'm speaking, of course, of the restoration of governor weatherby swann. let's face it, you don't keep a pimp like j-dawg in the dugout for two whole movies without one HELL of a denouement in the wings. just seeing the conclusion of the arc of the mistrust he had for will turner, an unresolved conflict they'd been building for two movies now, promised to be an incredible moment. maybe when he was walking his daughter down the aisle, or maybe when norrington and turner found themselves having to set aside their differences to save elizabeth jack, another loose end the third movie would have to touch on sooner or later. when we finally got to the "and THAT'S why you hire jonathan freaking PRYCE for a role like this" moment, it was going to be awesome.
"One word, love. Curiosity. You long for freedom. You long to do what you want to do because you want it. To act on selfish
impulse. You want to see what it's like. One day, you won't be able to resist." - Jack Sparrow
but the crème de la crème, the moment we'd all been waiting for, the bit that i couldn't anticipate, the scene i couldn't wait to see because i honestly had no idea, coming out of the second movie, just how the hell they could possibly pull it off, was the inevitable conversation between jack and elizabeth. i mean, what do you say to the man you've killed when he returns from the dead and stands before you? "sorry" doesn't quite cut it. neither does "whoops." ditto "my bad." i mean, you could see it in the look in her eyes at the end of the second movie: the guilt was just searing into her psyche. it wasn't just about getting jack back, it was about being able to look at herself in the mirror again, as in ever. she would eventually get her happily ever after, once will finally squared his conflict with jack in whatever form that would finally take (needless to say: awesome), and jack would get his chance to sail off into the sunset. but in the meantime, jack and elizabeth had a HELL of a palaver to get through first, and i just couldn't wait to see how it all fell into place. awesome, awesome, awesome.
it begins promisingly enough. hell, the opening prologue is simply breathtaking. an assembly line of executions is formed as wave after wave of captured pirates are hung at beckett's gallows, while a redcoat ominously reads the patriot act official decree which has stripped them of their habeas corpus rights (featuring a holocaust museum-sized pile of boots, just in case somebody missed the point).
a dirge from a doomed cabin boy (the all new musical interlude "hoist the colors," which provides the third movie's score with an especially poignant counterpoint to balance the themes from the first two films) turns into a grand choral call to arms, the condemned using their last breaths to cry out for posthumous vengeance from their pirate brethren. suddenly, it's les miserables of the caribbean, and as the title credits appear, even as you're still trying to process the fact that ZOMG THEY JUST HUNG A KID IN A DISNEY MOVIE, the snare drums fade into the darkness and the stakes, you realize, couldn't possibly be higher. the pirates are fighting for their very lives.
[except, well . . . we've already met the resurrected bootstrap bill and captain barbossa in the last film, and we know damn well from the trailer that jack's coming back too. the pirates franchise might as well have been imagined by joss whedon, so unfinal is the final judgment.]
then the credits fade. and the trouble begins.
princess leia elizabeth swann, disguised as a bounty hunter slave girl, arrives at jabba the hutt's sao feng's palace in
tatooine singapore (along with chewbacca barbossa) to cut a deal, finally rescuing han solo will turner . . .
let me back up a bit. you might want to get comfortable; this is going to take a while. i'm approaching this as not simply a thematic exploration, but also a what-the-hell-happened? breakdown of the events of the story itself, as a public service to those who only saw it once, got lost, and don't feel like going back for more.
the two most important trivia bullet points on the imdb page about pirates of the caribbean: at world's end are these:
• they started filming without a finished script.
• the first cut of the film was over 3 hours long.
that pretty much tells you absolutely everything you need to know. somewhere along the line, on its way through the editing process, a decision was made that started with the ending and worked its way backwards. everything that supported the ending was kept, and everything which meandered along the way, taking the scenic route instead of the interstate, was cut. which would be totally fine, if this wasn't the third movie in a trilogy. essentially, it was edited as a movie in which (don't say i didn't warn you about spoilers) will turner and elizabeth swann get married, and nothing whatsoever like a sequel to a movie in which jack and elizabeth's compasses are all kinds of broken for one another. [yeah. i'm a closet sparrowbethian. wanna make something of it?] or like a sequel to a movie that was all about escaping the kraken. or like a sequel to a movie where norrington was posited as the perfect redemptive anti-hero to work with governor swann to disentangle the royal navy from its east india trading company overlords. or like a sequel to a movie that ended with the pirates heading off to world's end to get jack back, simply because it was a perfectly good idea on its own merits.
pulling this story down to 168 minutes meant they had to make some hard choices about what to keep and what to throw away. in the end, it's still a brilliant tale -- but when you look at some of the irrelevant filler that made the cut (i'm looking at you, One-Eyed McCrabInPants) and hold it up next to some severe deficits in storytelling, to say nothing of editing . . . in the end, it's a great third pirates movie. but as a conclusion to a saga, it falls terribly, terribly short.
unfortunately, like a plane needing to lighten the weight of its cargo hold before takeoff, so many loose ends have been discarded rather than resolved, there's no way a second trilogy, much less a fourth movie, could possibly conclude things properly. honestly, they should have looked at all of the material they had and decided to go for a tetralogy. it's not like we wouldn't have shown up. but, no. instead of the satisfying taste of a roast that's been done right by a crock pot, we're left with rushed. microwaved slices both undercooked and burnt, with a faintly nauseating dorm kitchen ramen-and-popcorn aftertaste.
where was i. ah, yes. singapore. if you spend any amount of time in the media/tv section of borders or barnes and noble looking through the illustrated coffee table books about the making of this film, you start to realize that it really is like the ride that inspired it -- a series of gorgeous vignettes, with only the loosest paper-thin connective tissue leading you from one scene to the next. singapore is lavishly illustrated in the making-of books, with detailed pencil sketches and lush pastels and all manner of fabulous artwork that went into the pre-visualization of the set, the scenes, the storyboarding -- the filmmakers obviously loved getting the chance to finally show us singapore, after hinting about it over the last few films.
i'm still not sure why they needed to. the pirates come before sao feng and say they need a ship and a crew. so, what, they walked to singapore? from the caribbean? and since when did pirates ask for a ship? ever?
true, they also say they need navigational charts to make it to (or, as it happens, back from) the land of the dead. then again, in the last movie we were told they simply needed "a captain who knows dose waters." but neither barbossa nor tia dalma seem to be any help at all when it comes to escaping the land of the dead itself. i'm getting ahead of myself again, but the more you start to think about it, the more it unravels. the filmmakers try their best to turn "hoist the colours" into a magical subpoena, making pieces of eight everywhere into something like the owls in the harry potter films, ringing a magical tone that only real pirates can hear (or something). this is apparently planned out by lord cutler beckett, who ominously says "finally" at the news that the pirates have started singing in the prologue, as though he knew all along that the way to summon the brethren court was to kill a bunch of pirates wholesale until one of them finally started singing the song. but in beckett's very next scene he doesn't seem to know the significance of the pieces of eight at all. it's a sun-addled mess from the start, and it spends several hours only getting messier.
the singapore sequence is very, very pretty. we're reintroduced to everybody, the song gets a few more lyrics, we get to see some funny/pretty/jaw-dropping bits involving keira in a robe, (one review pointed out that she seems to be carrying a "really big gun in her boot"), we're introduced to sao feng (for all the good it will do), and there's some fun swordfightery to be had from all sides. plus, sailing past a town on fire was one of the big moments from the ride that was still as yet unrealized. then will and sao feng start scheming ("if you want to make a deal with beckett, you need what i offer," will emphatically says, without actually mentioning what he's offering) and the film starts to turn up the inscrutable.
the flying dutchman atomizes a couple of random pirate ships, but nobody we know is on them, so who cares. (one is forced to wonder where all of the pirates they were hanging in the prologue were coming from, given that it takes a few scenes before jones is ordered to leave a few survivors on the ships he takes). newly promoted admiral norrington is returned the sword that will turner made him for his promotion ceremony as commodore, and governor swann gets to say a line and look sad.
there's a cut scene that should have gone here that's absolutely magnificent. nothing is covered in this conversation that particularly drives the plot or that's not able to be picked up by the other scenes -- which is why they cut it, one imagines, as it's mostly about other characters being given information we either already have, that we learn later elsewhere, or that we know isn't true. but, oh, what we miss in its absence. all we can hope for is that they actually filmed it and that it makes it onto the dvd. it's essentially the scene that swann refers to later, when he says that he discovered the secret about the heart of davy jones and the dead man's chest. what we don't see in the film is how it all plays out. jones tells the governor that elizabeth is dead, taken by the kraken. swann whirls on norrington, demanding to know if he knew. the chest is opened, and swann takes a bayonet to the heart. he's warned of the consequences, and is ready to make the kill himself, when norrington, in shock over the news of elizabeth's death, stops the governor, saying "elizabeth would not have wanted this."
given what could have been, it's basically christopher lee in return of the king all over again.
the pirates really do sail to the ends of the earth. i point this out because it's something the last movie suggested we were going to see, but this time they actually deliver. the monkey shivers. tia dalma declares that davy jones' locker is a place of eternal punishment, and apparently jumping into the kraken's mouth has led to jack sparrow being "taken, body and soul." i'm assuming the black spot has something to do with it, because the kraken takes a hell of a lot of people in dead man's chest but jack's the only one who's apparently only "mostly" dead. as for the black pearl itself . . . oh hell, your guess is as good as mine. maybe because it was resurrected once already? maybe because a pirate lord's ship has something approximating a soul, and can thereby join its master in the afterlife? (!?) maybe because the black spot marks not only the person, but his or her effects, including their ship? [this is the only explanation that remotely covers why the kraken didn't leave the pearl at once and head immediately for the longboat jack was in when he first tried to make a break for it at the end of dead man's chest, so, sure, what the hell, let's run with it.]
then we come back to the endeavour for more bits with jones and beckett. apparently knowing about the chest means governor swann isn't valuable any more, in spite of the fact that everybody in the caribbean knows about the chest at this point, and in spite of that whole (somewhat crucial) plot point about needing his "authority as governor" and his "influence in london" to get any support from the royal navy. it's there because the better scene isn't, and it doesn't make any sense, but by this point (half an hour in) there's no better time to start getting used to that sort of thing. and, hey, murtogg and mullroy are back! as east india trading company agents! which serves . . . no real purpose whatsoever. i mean, nice to see them getting work and all, but they don't have nearly enough to do. and since every other EITC agent is a disposable red shirt blue jacket, there will be many an uncomfortable moment ahead in the battle scenes to come, as characters that look exactly like characters we sort of like are mowed down in battle.
then comes The Waterfall Scene. and honestly, i'm torn. on the one hand, yay, direct reference to the ride. and in case you didn't know the ride goes over a waterfall (okay, it goes down a slight hill, but it does it in darkness, and when you're going on the ride for the first time as a kid it's pretty much the coolest thing ever), barbossa quotes it directly: "Ye may not survive to pass this way again... And these be the last friendly words ye hear." and in case that wasn't enough of a telegraph, there's a series of audio clips taken directly from the ride itself after the ship falls over the side ("Hoist your colors, ye bloomin' cockroaches!" "Shift yer cargo, dearie, show 'em yer larboard side!" "Dead men tell no tales!"). and it's a fun scene, especially watching barbossa laughing his head off, exactly like he's on a ride at an amusement park or something. it's like absolutely nothing we've seen before. [or at least not since erik the viking.] turns out they didn't need a ship and a crew from sao feng, they just needed a few barrels and a couple of oars. and it's bothersome to watch regular old live humans fall hundreds, if not thousands, of feet off a waterfall into the land of the dead and survive, even though their ship is smashed to pieces. don't tell me, let me guess. "tia dalma's magic protected them." or something. i know, i know, "just repeat to yourself 'it's just a show'; you should really just relax." but damnit, at least the aztec gold tried to make sense. there were still rules. the undead pirates obeyed gravity. we've landed very solidly in the land of "just making this shit up as we go along," and it's insulting.
for just a moment there, i had a sinking feeling that davy jones' locker would turn out to be nothing but footage of the actors in modern dress simply waiting in line to board the ride itself. but no, they had something even more surreal waiting for us.
multiple johnny depps! representing a manifestation of his fractured consciousness! my GOD, man!
stunned, STUNNED i am by the creativity! nobody's EVER THOUGHT OF DOING THAT BEFORE!
so. anyway. the locker.
i get what they were trying to do. malkovich malkovich, malkovich malkovich malkovich. nicely quirky musical cues, combined with some straight-out-of-sundance experimental film sequences. the novelty value alone is a worthwhile effort.
and i can even appreciate tia dalma reaching in with her magical crab powers and extracting the black pearl from its landlocked berth, figuring that she'd drag jack right out along with it. and the crabs are cute.
but no amount of reconciliatory tylenol will help explain how you escape davy jones' locker by just getting in a ship that also happened to be there at the time and then sailing away from it, or even sailing away from it and then flipping your ship upside down. it's pitched as some sort of custom-built hell dimension reachable only by kraken or waterfall, this iteration of which is specifically designed to torment jack. yet apparently a parachute and a kayak is all you need for a roundtrip ticket.
adorable watching the two captains go all "DUCK season! RABBIT season!" on each other, though, i have to admit.
still in the eternal hell dimension with no wind in it, the black pearl sails into the sunset. jack and elizabeth manage to not quite resolve anything, and then the crew finds themselves being passed by hundreds of dead people, drifting and/or floating back behind them towards . . . that desolate beach that didn't have anybody on it. or something. maybe they each get their own beaches. this would be a really awesome time for barbossa to weigh in on the whole afterlife thing, but he just tells the rest of the crew that "it's best just let them be." tia dalma seems really quite pissed that davy jones isn't doing his job (which will be kind of ironic in about an hour).
then comes the big tragic scene between elizabeth and her father, which is also noteworthy because jack sparrow's gentle comment ("elizabeth. we're not back.") and elizabeth's reaction shot is the closest damn thing they'll have to any actual damn moment of genuine damn connection together in the whole damn movie. seriously. the emotional climax of this soggy little trilogy gets NO RESOLUTION WHATSOEVER. not that i'm bitter.
governor swann delivers exposition we'll hear about two or three more times over the course of the movie, and then drifts off into the afterlife. the tony award-winning character actor once called the hamlet of his generation does yeoman's work, so to speak, with the seven damn lines this movie gives him, but the tears in your eyes are still likelier to be the tragedy of what they could have done with his character instead of what they ended up doing to him. elizabeth gets some tasty, tasty scenery to chew, and does an admirable job of it before wilting in a way that's, frankly, completely out of character by this point. it looks more like they just ran out of lines for her to say. and then, as will asks if there's a way to interrupt the process, tia dalma shakes her head and says "him at peace." is it even possible for a murder victim to be at peace? did barbossa simply have more to live for than swann? and is he going to start demonstrating that anytime soon?
in what's apparently the end of the next day, the crew's out of water, out of rum, and tia dalma helpfully informs them that they're moments away from being trapped forever in the land of the dead. since the sun hadn't yet set when they were underway the day before, you apparently get until the second sunset after you start sailing to escape the land of the dead, so lucky thing you brought a voodoo priestess along. except, and i hate to say this, as magical arcane yoda archetypes go, tia dalma kind of sucks. if it doesn't involve crabs, she pretty much either snarls or looks befuddled through most of the movie. given that the whole "travel to the land of the dead to bring jack back" venture was her idea in the first place, one is left with the distressing impression of the roommate's girlfriend who demanded everyone get up early to drive several hours to get to bonnaroo in time for the opening act, but didn't realize until standing in front of the will call booth that she forgot the credit card the tickets were charged with.
then jack starts up a conversation with miniature versions of himself on his shoulders, which is also completely original and not at all derivative and we've never seen anything like that before either.
jack then decodes the map in the nick of time, and gets the rest of the crew to help him capsize the ship.
the bad news is that this scene really is as stupid as it sounds. but the good news is that you're not likely to care, because they're finally up and moving and running around and no longer getting all emo on one another, for a brief, blessed interlude, even a relentlessly improbable one. i've cued "up is down" roughly 30 times on my ipod in the past week or so because it's the single perkiest musical sequence on the whole soundtrack, a whirlwind of a jig. and given that we're only about an hour in to what's almost a three hour movie, this explains a lot as to why the tomatometer is stuck at a lousy 47%. the crew runs back and forth on the bridge of the pearl, looking nothing so much like a pack of kids in pirate garb at recess on a giant jungle gym. it's a really fun scene to watch, even as the whole left side of your brain is wincing and going "what? wait . . . wait . . . WHAT?!?"
whatever; sunset is now sunrise; the ship flips; the sea and the sky change places; gravity reverses itself; the world is turned inside out; they're all alive again. fine. time for the mexican standoff moment that will in no way remind you of every other movie that has a mexican standoff moment. plus dialogue: blah blah brethren court blah blah beckett blah blah jones. what makes this one a keeper is the evil undead pirate monkey (with clothes) pulling a gun on cotton's parrot. it may damn well be my new very favorite moment in film.
at will's suggestion, they make their way to The Island With The Dead Kraken On It, which isn't at all suspicious or improbable. jack and barbossa, for one single moment in the whole series, get to have a palaver like old friends, pirate to pirate, ("the world used to be a bigger place" "the world's still the same. there's just less in it"), and you suddenly wish there was more time to take the scenic route.
then the giant metaphorical storytelling corkboard in the sky with the index cards on it that's supposed to be keeping the story straight somehow gets turned into a rube goldberg contraption involving yarn that was left alone too long with a couple of cats.
sao feng's men suddenly turn on the crew, bringing everyone back onto the black pearl. will has led a mutiny in order to hand jack to sao feng in exchange for the pearl, but elizabeth has been chained with the rest. will demands her freedom as sao feng hands jack off to cutler beckett (huh huh huh. i said "hands jack off."), and sao feng finds the deal he had with beckett being altered by mercer just as he's altering the deal he had with will. it's all very lando and vader in cloud city, except sped up too fast to actually keep track of anything.
mercer finally shuts out sao feng, leaving him with barbossa to get all enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend with him. barbossa dresses up elizabeth in calypso gift wrap to get sao feng to point his triceratops horns away from the pearl and towards the endeavor, as jack agrees to sell out the brethren court in exchange for getting his account with jones settled. the compass gets tossed back and forth a few times, too, since it was the main plot point of the last movie and SAG rules says it gets at least three closeups plus residuals in the sequel.
again: whatever. it's all just a bunch of people standing around talking, double- and triple-crossing each other entirely because the scriptwriters decided the aztec gold thing was way too straightforward last time around. or maybe they just hate us; the jury's still out.
also, the deleted scene to end all deleted scenes takes place in the middle of this sequence, just as cutler beckett offers jack a commission (verbatim, from the novelization):
"So I am offering you a job. In the employ of the East India Trading Company. Working for me."
"We've been down that road before, haven't we? And we both know how you get when your advances are spurned." (jack holds up the brand on his wrist)
"I had contracted with you to deliver cargo on my behalf. You chose to liberate it."
"People aren't cargo, mate."
let that sink in a bit. then realize what extremely stylistic (yet somewhat incomprehensible) scene from the second movie suddenly gets thrown into sharp relief with this context to redefine it:
it doesn't do anything for the action at hand. and if anything, it doesn't just completely scrub away jack's moral ambiguity; it damn near canonizes him. i don't know if they filmed that bit or not; having it cut from the film is inconsequential. but i want i want i want.
blah blah calypso, blah blah pirate court, blah blah deals within deals.
elizabeth goes off on the empress, and the black pearl gets to do some grand cannonade and sword action until jack sparrow gets another chance to swing by the yardarm after disabling the endeavour. it's not that it's a bad sequence, really; but good luck getting it all squared away as it unfolds without seeing it a second or third time. on the other hand, it's a scene like this that truly makes a second viewing worthwhile; freed from the burden of having to keep track of the back-and-forth, you can just sit back and enjoy the fun parts. jack throws will in the brig, and the ships part company as night falls.
on board the empress, we get to see sao feng's pimp strut. it's a groovy scene, all the way up to that whole sao-feng-turns-rapist-and-then-gets-pointlessly-killed bit, as the flying dutchman attacks. elizabeth is handed the singapore pirate lord's piece of eight and gets named captain (whatever; it's disney) and she goes to the bridge and promptly runs into norrington. their reunion probably could have gone better; her father's death and norrington's complicity in the Evils That Bewigged Men Do get thrown in his face, and, (in a gift to fic writers everywhere), she elects to spend the night in a cell with a bunch of chinese pirates she's just met rather than in the admiral's quarters. she then goes about tracking down bootstrap, who's deep in the process of losing his humanity as well as his mind. we get more exposition about the nature of the dead man's chest, in case it was missed before.
then it's time to play Hey Kids! Guess What Seagulls Do To Dead Bodies! (personally, i can't wait for the happy meal connect-the-dots diagram.) will and jack scheme a bit on the black pearl, and in retrospect this is pretty much exactly the point where they lost me.
"And you're willing to cut out your heart and bind yourself to the Dutchman? Forever?"
"No, mate. I'm free forever. Free to sail the seas beyond the edges of the map. Free from death itself."
"You have to do the job, though, Jack. You have to ferry souls to the next world. Or end up just like Jones."
"Ew. I don't have the face for tentacles. But immortal has to count for something, eh?"
the second line up there is pure, unfiltered jack. but the fourth line? it looks like jack. it even sounds like jack. but that? right up there? not jack. here, let me illustrate:
JACK
NOT JACK
one of the things that the cognitive dissonance of at world's end did for me once and for all (re: its lack of connectivity to what came before it) is galvanize my understanding of what was going through jack sparrow's mind when he jumped into the kraken's mouth. they stuffed dead man's chest full to the brim with red herrings. his rings. his baubles. his hat. the things he shoplifted from tia dalma's shack. i spent a nonzero amount of thought contemplating just what trinket it must have been that let him know without question that this wasn't really death he was facing. there must have been something. it's in his nature to run from death, not to heroically embrace it, therefore, q.e.d., he must have had an ace up his sleeve.
turns out, not so much. he just died. it was a stupid, pointless death after all, and he didn't have any hidden magic trick to send him anywhere but his own special hell.
which means that his bravery was genuine, and not an act. he faced his death with the bravura we probably would have expected from him on any other day if he was just holding his nose and jumping back onto the synchronicity highway, counting on his raw charisma to save him. but this time was different. he really was facing his real death, no bluff, no quarter. but he did it with panache. he even did it with dignity.
and now we're to understand that he would rather spend eternity notfree, doing a job -- a job-- because he was suddenly, having been there, afraid of death? simply, no. i deny. categorically.
not that i'm against character arcs. but getting two-thirds and US$1.7 billion dollars into one of the most entertaining trilogies in the history of trilogies, and then turning around and ignoring all of the unresolved character development otherwise left hanging in order to saddle the most undiluted trickster archetype to come along in eons, the hero of heroes, peter-pan-in-dreadlocks, with a mid-life crisis? just . . . meh.
notjack sails back off towards the brethren court, and will and the compass are left bobbing in the path of the endeavour. good thing, too, because if beckett hadn't given the compass back to jack, he'd . . . now be able to use it to follow notjack, who's going to the brethren court . . . which is what beckett's trying to find. again, the more you think about it, the more it unravels.
then, suddenly, it's norrington's turn to be heroic! finally! we get the action scene we've been waiting for ever since he disentangled himself from a water wheel way back in the day. he finally gets a real chance to utterly redeem himself by hatching a complex plan worthy of a man of letters that was at the top of his class in tactical strategy, involving getting word to the british soldiers still loyal to him so they can meet . . . and, i'm lying. he opens a stupid door and then he gets killed. stupidly. i mean, there's bits there that are genuinely nifty. there's just enough strain on elizabeth's relationship with will at this moment that when she says "james, come with me," it sounds like all the cards are at least potentially on the table. his is a sacrifice which is not unaccompanied by genuine grief on his part; he knows damn well what he's giving up, and he also knows why there isn't any choice. and he gets to die with his boots on, his eyes open, and his sword in his hand (with the other end sticking out of his enemy's torso, albeit fruitlessly), in the name of honor and duty and all that other stuff he always seemed so proud of -- those moments he was clean-shaven and sober, anyway. and, hey, he gets to deliver what may not be anywhere near the kiss of a lifetime, but it was certainly the kiss of his life. so, there's that. but a chance encounter with bootstrap bill the lobotomized watch-pirate is a crummy, awful way to die, any way you slice it.
will turner's sword gets passed, as it were, to davy jones. and then, without the admiral's mitigating influence, the dutchman crew kill all but a dozen EITC agents, who are holding down the fort with mercer and the heart and the chest and a few choice tabletop cannons in the captain's cabin. it's very, very important that you completely forget this fact in another hour or so, when the flying dutchman is back in combat and there suddenly seem to be an unlimited supply of agents for the others to fight. think of them like the bullets in james bond's gun. (or jack sparrow's, for that matter.)
both davy jones and mercer each sort of answered to the admiral when he was alive, but they were otherwise both unhinged bloodthirsty misogynist sociopaths in their own right. and now they suddenly find themselves with a lot of guns, a supernaturally powerful ship, and a bunch of escaped prisoners with a female captain something like three, four hundred yards astern, tops. they turn around, easily catch up to the empress, and blow her out of the water, saving elizabeth swann from drowning at the last minute. given what happened to her later at mercer's hands, and then at davy jones', and then his crew, her last sane thoughts were prayers for a death that would never come, cursing jack sparrow and will turner with every sobbing breath for letting her get trapped in such a terrible fate.
oh, wait, that didn't happen. but we're given no bloody reason for it not to. the battle-ravaged empress just magically gets away from the flying dutchman and winds up at the brethren court, because the heirlooms of the pirate lords are apparently also homing devices. or something.
the pearl brings its crew to shipwreck cove, and barbossa reveals, ninety minutes in, that tia dalma is actually calypso. you know. for those who were still trying to figure out who the sea goddess trapped in human form could possibly be. since we already know it's not elizabeth. and there are only two women in the cast.
more wheelings and dealings on the endeavour between beckett, jones, and will turner, as we learn that calypso is the one davy jones was in love with. since we already know it's not elizabeth. and there are only two women in the cast. davy jones reveals that he was the one who showed the first brethren court how to bind calypso, and then everyone in the room immediately forgets that davy jones just said he'd been to the first brethren court (and yes, barbossa does stand at the table and say that the first court met "at this very spot"). thankfully, the fact that they don't have anyone among them who knows where the brethren court meets doesn't matter, because will's also got jack's compass.
i swear, screenwriting like this just makes me want to punch a baby. what the HELL, man?
we then crane in on what's either a really detailed miniature or a cgi rendering of ewok village minas tirith shipwreck cove, a dazzling island constructed entirely of wrecked ships. so their "nigh-impenetrable fortress" . . . is composed of driftwood.
look, i'm not remembering things wrong, here, am i? didn't the first movie at least try to make a little bit of sense? aztec gold, cursed pirates, moonlight shows their skeletal form, blood to be repaid, right? it wasn't THAT complicated and/or ludicrous, (at least, certainly not in hindsight), was it?
finally, the brethren court is convened. in addition to notjack sparrow, pirate lord of the caribbean, (so we establish right away that being a pirate "lord" has all of the authority, power, and status of a cardboard burger king crown), there's barbossa, pirate lord of the caspian sea (shh! don't tell him it's landlocked), ammand the corsair, pirate lord of the black sea, capitane chevelle, pirate lord of the mediterranean sea, mistress ching, pirate lord of the pacific ocean, gentleman jocard, pirate lord of the atlantic ocean, sri sumbhajee, pirate lord of the indian ocean, eduardo villanueva, pirate lord of the adriatic sea, and . . . elizabeth turner, pirate lord of the south china sea.
as the star trek: the next generation episode "best of both worlds, part ii" painfully reminds us, a cliffhanger is only as good as the sum of its parts. "so tell me . . . what's become of my ship?" a line that, prior to about three weeks ago, sent chills up my spine for pretty much an entire year there, finds its conclusion in . . . a board meeting. that's why barbossa was raised from the dead. that's why the whole first half of the movie happened. that's why they needed to drag jack back from davy jones' locker. that's why james norrington and governor weatherby swann and sao feng had to die. for a damn board meeting.
on the other hand, at least there's no powerpoint presentation. the pieces of eight are collected. (surprise! barbossa's is actually ragetti's wooden eye! surprise! notjack's is actually the coin he's got hanging from the top of his bandanna -- hey, maybe if they make eight or nine of these we'll learn what all of his baubles do, like the various compartments on the chassis of r2-d2!) elizabeth shows up. proposals and counter-proposals are suggested. a fight breaks out.
then we go to the brig of the black pearl, where barbossa has locked up tia dalma. her music box is echoed by the appearance of davy jones and his music box. when faced with her own culpability in why davy jones is no longer ferrying the dead like he's supposed to, the point she was bitterly complaining about back in the locker, she just shrugs it off with a capricious smile and says "tis my nature." she touches him and he briefly becomes human again before changing back to his cephelapodishness. this is actually a nicely done moment. it looks as though he's going to kill her himself, but can't quite bring himself to do it. so love conquers all in the end. or something. even though there was a deal on the table between will and davy jones and beckett a couple of scenes ago that seemed to conclude with will telling jones where to find calypso in exchange for his father's freedom and his and elizabeth's safety, it all pretty much seems to have been forgotten about. tia dalma swears that this court (which has been pretty much established as not anything but the inheritors of the trinkets of the first court, e.g. "there's not been a gathering like this in our lifetime") will understand how cruel she can be before she kills them all. boy. the follow-through on that should be delicious, huh? can't wait for that scene.
back to the brethren court, because, hell, why not. barbossa stops the fight with a gunshot, notjack goes on about cuttlefish for a while, they bicker before the court, and then barbossa summons the keeper of the code. this is one of the better stunt casting maneuvers i've seen in a while; keith richards was reportedly drunk off his ass when he filmed his scenes, but if you're going to play mr. sparrow, that's kind of in the job description. the dog with the keys improbably shows up, having successfully escaped cannibal island, to which teague just shrugs and says "sea turtles, mate."
there's a lesson in that. we'll come back to it.
a vote is called to declare a pirate king, and notjack completely interferes with the democratic process by throwing a second vote behind elizabeth. voila, she's the pirate king. it's somewhere around this point that you start to wonder if maybe this whole damn saga has been constructed simply to give disney another strong female protagonist they can put on t-shirts and insert into parades and build an animated tv show around. and maybe that's all it needs to be. keith richards breaks a guitar string, and elizabeth declares war. (bloodthirsty li'l minx, ain't she?)
notjack and teague have their own kind of father-son bonding moment, which is its own philosophical touchstone:
"What? You seen it all, done it all. You survived. That's the trick, in' it? To survive?"
"It's not just about living forever, Jackie. The trick is living with yourself forever."
and notjack gets a shrunken head. (seriously. he's wearing it on his belt the next time we see him.)
morning. the field at agincourt. i mean, the fogged-in waters off the shores of nowhere in particular. the fleet discovers that they face a massive armada, and cotton's parrot flies off for shore because the writers were tired of coming up with new bits of dialogue for him. (i'm not making this up; it's in their interview on boxofficemojo.com.) notjack calls for parlay, and the soundtrack improbably jumps from orchestral wagnerian strings to heavy van halenian guitar.
elizabeth, notjack, and barbossa meet will, beckett, and davy jones on a sandbar between the two fleets. davy jones stands in a barrel of seawater, which is funny until you try to parse the idea that the whole "can only come ashore once every ten years" thing has a ridiculously broad loophole. and, what, did beckett and will use the fireman's carry when they moved him over from the boat? o rly?
anyway. blah blah you'll all die blah blah no, YOU'LL all die, blah blah double cross blah blah triple cross blah blah you killed my father blah blah inigo montoya blah. barbossa slices notjack's piece of eight off his braid (if all they needed this whole time was the damn trinket, couldn't they have just sent a single crab into the locker to steal it from . . . oh never mind), will and notjack trade places, and davy jones stares down notjack, who wilts like a kid facing the meanest bully on the playground (see NOT JACK, above). "do you fear death?" "you have no idea." fortunately, that's not jack. if it were jack i'd be standing up in the theater and shouting at the screen over what they'd done to the character who had once stared into the maw of the kraken itself. but notjack? piffle. who cares.
will, elizabeth, and barbossa return to the black pearl, and davy jones gets a piggyback ride from notjack back to the dinghy from his barrel. davy jones brings notjack aboard the flying dutchman and promptly enacts his revenge, supernaturally extracting the oath from him that binds notjack to the ship for the next hundred years. no, wait. i mean he throws him in the brig. ha. listen to me, all "and then the supervillain shot james bond a whole bunch of times in the face." right. THAT not real.
we get some more time with the minijacks, who have now returned to original size, and also a look at barnaclejack, who likes to take out his brain and lick it. one of the minijacks extracts a peanut from notjack's dreadlocks and eats it. clearly, the screenwriters have decided that we have been bad and we need to be punished.
back on the pearl, barbossa performs the spell that releases calypso from her tia dalma shell. it's at this point in the movie that you have to remember that they had a budget of US$300 MILLION DOLLARS, and that included things like writing the script down on pieces of paper and having those pieces of paper read by people who have been to movies before and presumably had some idea of what works and what doesn't.
i've been over the film backwards and forwards and i can still find no reason whatsoever for the crew of the black pearl to try to hold down tia dalma with ropes. their only goal in this scene is twofold: 1. set calypso free, and 2. don't piss her off. and yet, after they've enabled the ritual that releases the sea goddess, they still hold onto the ropes. it's just stupid. even after it turns into the attack of the 50 foot voodoo priestess and she suddenly goes from being held down by eight people who walked her upstairs from the brig while holding a few dozen feet of line to being tied to the mast and a bunch of cleats and held down by dozens of ropes hundreds of feet in length. really, really stupid. and the ropes not only lengthen ridiculously, but thicken. like her modesty-concealing-to-the-bitter-end dress, they're apparently made of the same insta-grow superhero fabric as the incredible hulk's pants. stupid, stupid, stupid.
and how is this climax rendered? [remembering all the while that it's being produced under the auspices of the same production team that brought us davy jones, a cgi effect so realistic they had to make a point of informing critics it wasn't a prosthetic.] with utterly craptastic pre-cgi-era front-projection and rear-projection technology so atrocious it literally looks like a demo reel that never made it through final processing. remember the last time we saw an attack of a 50 foot woman? it was dude, where's my car. AND THEIR SPECIAL EFFECTS WERE BETTER.
and when barbossa asks for mercy, she cuts loose with...some sort of unintelligible noise in response. if it was supposed to be english, the filmmakers just abysmally failed. if it wasn't supposed to be english, it damn well should have been subtitled.
then she turns into crabs. god damnit, i can't even believe i'm actually writing this. the big effects payoff to what's supposed to have been the wrap-up conclusion of one of my favorite movie sagas in years, and it's a fifty-foot woman turning into thousands of crabs and then disappearing into the sea.
then of course comes elizabeth's agincourt moment, when she stands before the black pearl crew and galvanizes the entire fleet into battle. holy cow. nine pirate lords commanding dozens of pirate ships. we weren't just seeing a half-dozen ĭ-grē'jəs ethnic stereotypes flouting about a board meeting for no reason but for the funny accents; oh no. a scene or two ago they had just been at each other's throats, the chaos of years of hostility, and now elizabeth swann the pirate king (i know, right?) had magnetized their battle compasses against a common foe. we would see french pirate elbow-to-elbow with spanish and turkish and chinese and japanese and hindi pirate. their own styles of combat, their own strengths and weaknesses, all coming to bear against the armada of the east india trading company and the flying dutchman. a battle royale unlike any ever witnessed. my GOD, it was going to be awesome.
kidding. the brethren court raise their flags dramatically and then they sit back and have a big multi-ethnic potluck barbecue while they put their feet up and let the black pearl do all of the actual fighting. but barbossa was quick to fill the hull with spare pirates from the other ships, so that they'd at least have the sweeps at the ready (remember? the oars from the first movie that made mincemeat out of the interceptor?) when it came down to a matter of speed deciding the advantage in combat.
kidding. honestly, it's like they didn't even watch the first two movies before writing this one.
if you've seen any press about this film, you've probably heard there's a whirlpool in it. and to be fair, it really is a spectacular sequence, watching the two ships go at it from opposing sides of a gigantic maelstrom.
it starts raining, but it's not just rain, it's "i've been released and i'm very, very angry" calypso rain. at least that's the way davy jones reacts to it. something interesting happens to barbossa when calypso is freed. he starts to relax. it's a subtle thing, but once his primary task of convening the court and releasing calypso is complete, he metaphorically rolls up his sleeves and starts to have fun again. and there's fun -- at least, his kind of fun -- to be had in spades, what with the whirlpool and the attacking pirates and everything.
it takes notjack a really, really long time to remember that the way to break out of a half-barrel pin hinged door is through the right leverage. he makes it out of the brig and gets to the cabin, letting murtogg and mullroy distract themselves while he makes off with the chest. meanwhile, davy jones gives mercer the cthulu treatment (which really is awesome, in a squicktastic sort of way) and gets the key. they meet at the halfway point, jones picks two completely different pronunciations for the word "bird" ("bud" and "beard") which completely spoils notjack's "migrate" pun, as notjack kicks a line free that hurls him to one of the higher yardarms, and jones uses his pass-through-matter trick as a high-speed elevator to face off with notjack.
then something happens. it's really quite breathtaking. notjack draws his sword . . . and becomes jack again. all at once. he holds his ground, is the big thing, and offers to set davy jones free. jones responds by saying his freedom "was forfeit long ago," and then attacks. they fight. at the top of a yardarm. on a ship in a fierce cannon battle in the middle of a gigantic maelstrom.
. . . .
suddenly, i'm on board again. suddenly, jack's back. suddenly, i'm watching the most pirate-y thing i've ever seen, and it's dazzling, and it's spectacular, and absolutely none of the egregious problems of the last two hours of movie matter, because it's all been what was needed to bring us to this moment. i'm watching the swordfight to end all swordfights, and it's awesome. it really, truly is.
the crews swing across the gulf to each other's ships. elizabeth and will spontaneously have possibly the most awesome wedding scene ever, each fighting off one opponent after another (you'll feel better if you pretend they're all undead pirates, even the human-looking ones in EITC uniforms) while barbossa officiates (while also fighting off opponents of his own). their kiss is one of those fantastic bubbles of tranquility that makes everything around them unfold in slow motion, and it's also pretty damn awesome. then they go back to the awesome yardarm swordfight, and pintel and ragetti awesomely shoot the monkey from a cannon, and bootstrap attacks his son, and all of the pieces -- will, jack, elizabeth, davy jones, bootstrap, will's sword, bootstrap's knife, the key, the chest -- spiral closer and closer together and it all starts to unfold like clockwork. awesome, awesome clockwork.
the actual resolution is almost completely satisfactory. words simply don't do it justice. it needs to be seen, and it needs to be seen on a big screen.
yes, i'm recommending the movie after all. surprise!
there are still problems before the credits roll. jack's escape from the flying dutchman ridiculously involves inventing the parasail. multogg and mullroy make an entertaining "when in rome" transformation, but it's also the final nail in the coffin of the royal navy. the maelstrom ends instantly and the sun comes out and the insane sea goddess is never seen or heard from again, which is a reprehensibly sloppy way of concluding her character arc. beckett's undoing is . . . well, it's really well photographed, but i wouldn't call it satisfactory. the armada and the pirate fleet pretty much just leave the battlefield without really resolving anything in the long-term, except in that "our champion beat up your champion" sort of way. which is, i suppose, good enough for a disney movie.
but the final resolutions are just one big awesome bucket of rainbow-sprinkled nifty. everyone says their goodbyes in just the right way, from pintel's "goodbye, poppet" to elizabeth's farewell kiss to the toast between gibbs and jack. while elizabeth's happy ending is bittersweet, it's still a pitch-perfect wrap-up, all the way around. at the end of the movie, absolutely everybody is placed just where they ought to be.
[the screenwriters have been quick to point out that the ending they "really wanted" had will turner being freed from the curse if his true love was waiting for him after ten years. which was why davy jones had been driven mad, you see, as calypso's absence at the ten year mark doomed him for an eternity of servitude aboard the dutchman. they claim the scene explaining this was "cut for time." sounds good, except it's not in the novelization either. which means it was never in the script. i call shenanigans.]
i'm sort of left with the conclusion that an attempt to understand the saga is itself an exercise in existentialism, or possibly just futility. in the end, no amount of effort involved in trying to make sense of it all will really lead anywhere, so just hang back, trust the sea turtles, bring the fun hat, pop some popcorn and try to enjoy the shiny. just like life.
[i'm literally out of room, at least as far as livejournal's concerned. there may be more . . . later.]