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xiphiasTwo word review: "Don't bother."
A longer review, with which I fully agree, is here.
This is not the worst movie ever made, not by a long shot. There are LOTS of movies worse than this one. See, in order to be really bad, you have to be trying to do something, and either succeed, but it's a really bad thing to try to do, or fail amazingly utterly. This movie isn't trying to do anything. At all.
So, it's really not anything other than pointless and boring.
It's like . . . you know how martial arts films have plots which are just kind of vague excuses to string together fight scenes?
Imagine that someone made a martial arts film, but totally forgot to put in any martial arts. And then, when they realized that, #1, they had no martial arts, and, #2, their movie was twenty minutes long, put in, oh, 140 minutes of CGI ships, and the occasional town, blowing up, for no particular reason, and CERTAINLY no reason that you care about. Lots of people die, I guess -- "hey! That monkey just shot a missile into a bunch of soldiers!" but you don't care about any of them, either positively or negatively.
Except. . .
Okay, fine, I'll put in a "spoiler" cut, even though, if you've not seen it, you should just not bother, and if you have seen it, you know you shouldn't have bothered.
That was a triple-decked 84-gun ship of the line! It's DESIGNED to have two smaller ships sail on either side of it! It had BOTH pirate ships outgunned six-to-one. EACH. They're MANNED to be able to fire double-broadsides! Will and Jack sailed their ships into EXACTLY the position the Endeavor could BEST blow them to hell.
Okay. That pissed me off.
The Council of Pirates, which had stereotypical pirates who dated from about 1400 (the Dutch privateer) to 1800 (the Tripoli and Malay pirates), that didn't bother me so much. The bopping back and forth between the Carrabean and Singapore in no significant time? I could deal with that.
I'm still baffled by why the East India Company is doing stuff in the West Indies, instead of, say, INDIA, but, y'know, whatever.
The plot makes less and less sense the more I think about it.
See, the East India Company knows that there is a magical coin which, in order to be activated, needs to have people executed in large numbers, until they start singing. Once they start singing, then the pirates will know that they have to contact other pirates and go around and figure out what's going on. Once they begin trying to contact each other, the East India Company will have to notice that something is going on, and then have to capture someone to figure out what's going on, because they don't know what's going on even though they knew what was going on when they executed lots of people to make it happen, even though they don't know what's happening now.
Then stuff happens. Except I don't really remember what. Because lots of it was pretty boring. Things blew up, because people were shooting at each other. Then people stopped shooting at each other, and started shooting at other people. Then more stuff blew up, and, somehow, some number of the people who were shooting at each other were working together.
Then people decided to shoot at different people, and sail a ship off the edge of the world, in order to make sure that Johnny Depp could be in the movie. And they did some other stuff. And somebody thought that Kiera Knightley was a goddess, and, let's face it, that's a pretty easy mistake to make, so he made her a pirate captain, even though all of us in the audience knew that it was the chick from New Orleans (although New Orleans wasn't invented yet, but, well, since they had Tripoli and Malay pirates, maybe New Orleans was invented, I dunno.)
The chick from New Orleans actually loves Squidface, who's back again, because they still had all the CGI-rendering files for Davey Jones's face, and it turned out that pirates are actually really powerful ritual magicians who have the ability to bind goddesses into human form.
And the East India Company kills Elizabeth Swan's father, because, y'know, they were bored and people might not have figured out that they were bad guys otherwise, and Admiral Norrington, who became Admiral Norrington by scheming his way into betraying his former fiancee' Elizabeth turns out to have been totally unaware of any of the stuff which, in the last move, I seem to remember HE had been in charge of and was doing, and he is actually a misguided good guy, which, if my memory of the last movie serves, was lied to and misled by, um, Admiral Norrington, probably.
Fish-people blow up. Humans blow up. Other things blow up.
Finally, the pirates, in a last ditch-effort to defeat the entire might of the British Navy which is the foremost power which rules the sea across the world, manage to release the Goddess of the Ocean, who controls the entire might of the sea.
When unleashed, she uses her vast, unimaginable power of control of the deep to, um, turn into a pile of crabs and wander off.
Um, oh, yeah -- and Will and Elizabeth have a quickie wedding, which, frankly, I hope Disney World starts offering a version of as one of its "Princess Wedding Packages", and Will is killed, but decides to become the Dread Pirate Roberts instead, and then Will and Jack, or maybe it's Barbossa, I don't really remember, or, frankly, care, decide to attack a triple-decker ship-of-the-line in EXACTLY the worst possible way they could, but it works because a random guy on board the warship doesn't tell the British to, like, shoot back, and, of course, the hundreds of ships of the British Navy, upon seeing one of their ships sunk, decide not to attack the nine, or maybe ten, pirate ships that are there, even though only two of them have even done ANYTHING whatsoever. And those two were shooting at each OTHER.
So then, since the British Navy had given up, and Elizabeth Turner, nee Swan was now a pirate Captain AND King of the Pirates, she gives it all up in order to have sex with Will once a decade and raise the kid that occurred from that. Instead of, y'know, what any of US would have done, which is to take a ship, be a pirate captain, and show up at Will's ship saying, "See, you get one day in ten years on dry land, but, see, I'm allowed to be on the sea as often as I want, so, hey, baby, want my permission to come aboard?"
Yeah, so, in summary, the movie kind of sucks.
A longer review, with which I fully agree, is here.
This is not the worst movie ever made, not by a long shot. There are LOTS of movies worse than this one. See, in order to be really bad, you have to be trying to do something, and either succeed, but it's a really bad thing to try to do, or fail amazingly utterly. This movie isn't trying to do anything. At all.
So, it's really not anything other than pointless and boring.
It's like . . . you know how martial arts films have plots which are just kind of vague excuses to string together fight scenes?
Imagine that someone made a martial arts film, but totally forgot to put in any martial arts. And then, when they realized that, #1, they had no martial arts, and, #2, their movie was twenty minutes long, put in, oh, 140 minutes of CGI ships, and the occasional town, blowing up, for no particular reason, and CERTAINLY no reason that you care about. Lots of people die, I guess -- "hey! That monkey just shot a missile into a bunch of soldiers!" but you don't care about any of them, either positively or negatively.
Except. . .
Okay, fine, I'll put in a "spoiler" cut, even though, if you've not seen it, you should just not bother, and if you have seen it, you know you shouldn't have bothered.
That was a triple-decked 84-gun ship of the line! It's DESIGNED to have two smaller ships sail on either side of it! It had BOTH pirate ships outgunned six-to-one. EACH. They're MANNED to be able to fire double-broadsides! Will and Jack sailed their ships into EXACTLY the position the Endeavor could BEST blow them to hell.
Okay. That pissed me off.
The Council of Pirates, which had stereotypical pirates who dated from about 1400 (the Dutch privateer) to 1800 (the Tripoli and Malay pirates), that didn't bother me so much. The bopping back and forth between the Carrabean and Singapore in no significant time? I could deal with that.
I'm still baffled by why the East India Company is doing stuff in the West Indies, instead of, say, INDIA, but, y'know, whatever.
The plot makes less and less sense the more I think about it.
See, the East India Company knows that there is a magical coin which, in order to be activated, needs to have people executed in large numbers, until they start singing. Once they start singing, then the pirates will know that they have to contact other pirates and go around and figure out what's going on. Once they begin trying to contact each other, the East India Company will have to notice that something is going on, and then have to capture someone to figure out what's going on, because they don't know what's going on even though they knew what was going on when they executed lots of people to make it happen, even though they don't know what's happening now.
Then stuff happens. Except I don't really remember what. Because lots of it was pretty boring. Things blew up, because people were shooting at each other. Then people stopped shooting at each other, and started shooting at other people. Then more stuff blew up, and, somehow, some number of the people who were shooting at each other were working together.
Then people decided to shoot at different people, and sail a ship off the edge of the world, in order to make sure that Johnny Depp could be in the movie. And they did some other stuff. And somebody thought that Kiera Knightley was a goddess, and, let's face it, that's a pretty easy mistake to make, so he made her a pirate captain, even though all of us in the audience knew that it was the chick from New Orleans (although New Orleans wasn't invented yet, but, well, since they had Tripoli and Malay pirates, maybe New Orleans was invented, I dunno.)
The chick from New Orleans actually loves Squidface, who's back again, because they still had all the CGI-rendering files for Davey Jones's face, and it turned out that pirates are actually really powerful ritual magicians who have the ability to bind goddesses into human form.
And the East India Company kills Elizabeth Swan's father, because, y'know, they were bored and people might not have figured out that they were bad guys otherwise, and Admiral Norrington, who became Admiral Norrington by scheming his way into betraying his former fiancee' Elizabeth turns out to have been totally unaware of any of the stuff which, in the last move, I seem to remember HE had been in charge of and was doing, and he is actually a misguided good guy, which, if my memory of the last movie serves, was lied to and misled by, um, Admiral Norrington, probably.
Fish-people blow up. Humans blow up. Other things blow up.
Finally, the pirates, in a last ditch-effort to defeat the entire might of the British Navy which is the foremost power which rules the sea across the world, manage to release the Goddess of the Ocean, who controls the entire might of the sea.
When unleashed, she uses her vast, unimaginable power of control of the deep to, um, turn into a pile of crabs and wander off.
Um, oh, yeah -- and Will and Elizabeth have a quickie wedding, which, frankly, I hope Disney World starts offering a version of as one of its "Princess Wedding Packages", and Will is killed, but decides to become the Dread Pirate Roberts instead, and then Will and Jack, or maybe it's Barbossa, I don't really remember, or, frankly, care, decide to attack a triple-decker ship-of-the-line in EXACTLY the worst possible way they could, but it works because a random guy on board the warship doesn't tell the British to, like, shoot back, and, of course, the hundreds of ships of the British Navy, upon seeing one of their ships sunk, decide not to attack the nine, or maybe ten, pirate ships that are there, even though only two of them have even done ANYTHING whatsoever. And those two were shooting at each OTHER.
So then, since the British Navy had given up, and Elizabeth Turner, nee Swan was now a pirate Captain AND King of the Pirates, she gives it all up in order to have sex with Will once a decade and raise the kid that occurred from that. Instead of, y'know, what any of US would have done, which is to take a ship, be a pirate captain, and show up at Will's ship saying, "See, you get one day in ten years on dry land, but, see, I'm allowed to be on the sea as often as I want, so, hey, baby, want my permission to come aboard?"
Yeah, so, in summary, the movie kind of sucks.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-05 12:17 pm (UTC)LOL EXCELLENT.
There's much controversy about the ending, though, the crap with Will being the captain of the Dutchman and the curse and all of that junk (and I STILL don't get it, but I THINK that during the first ten years of being cursed with ferrying souls to their resting place, Will can't bring up the Dutchman at will...except for that one time he needed to cut out his heart and give it to Elizabeth...which is a different curse that the Ferrying Souls one...)...but you're right, the movie was a total mess.
And swear nowhere lives a woman true and fair.
Date: 2007-06-05 12:52 pm (UTC)fyi, someone in
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-05 03:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-05 04:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-05 05:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-06 12:21 am (UTC)The thing is -- that guy who yelled "Abandon ship" -- had he yelled "Fire" instead, fewer British sailors would have died. And he had no more authority to yell "Abandon ship" than he did to yell "Fire!" Less, actually.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-06 01:17 pm (UTC)Possibly he would've done better to shoot Beckett in the back. Then again, I have no idea what the chain of command on that ship was. Why the hell was Beckett in command, anyway?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-06 12:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-06 02:04 pm (UTC)See, that's exactly how I felt about the first PoTC. But everybody thinks I'm weird for that.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-12 01:03 am (UTC)