[MyPantsAreOnFire]

Y'know how most "trilogies" are cleary films that never should have been troligies in the first place? Or even have sequels?

Yeah, this stretched out attempt at a "trilogy" is definitely one of those. I enjoyed the first film enough, but the next two are just absolute messes. Depp, Nighy and Rush seem to be the only (main actors) ones who "get" that these are ridiculous pirate movies based on a freakin' out-of-date robotic theme park ride, and it's refreshing to see them just go loose and have fun with it, Rush especially. Everyone else is too damn flat or serious, namely in the two sequels. Even Depp started slipping more into trying to play Jack "for real"...thank God for Rush for keeping up the scenery chewing to a wonderful level all the way through.

And can two people have any less chemistry than Orlando Bloom and Kiera Knightly? Knightly can be a decent acress, but Bloom is one of the most boring, one-note actors I've seen come along in a long time. You could subtract him from all three films and he wouldn't be missed from about 99% of them.

Look, I'm all for "story" or "big films" when they're done well and meant to be big and textured. These films are not. Hell, these films aren't even meant to be "filmS" in the first place.

Sorry, but I wasn't impressed. If I see the first one again, I'll pretend the other two don't exist.

[civilian_number_two]

STORY IS FUN!

Not enough fun? What about swordfights in the streets of Singapore? Monkeys with fireworks? Waterfalls and capsizing? Massive sea battles? Undead fish pirates going crazy? Pirate-on-pirate brawls? MAELSTROM! Blowing the shit out of the Endeavor?

Come on!

First, yes, story can be fun. The first Pirates movie had a lot going on, and rewarded attention to the twists and turns of the plot. Everything ultimately tied in to the backstory which was leaked out in appropriate measures between fun action scenes. These last two filsm, this latest less than the middle one, were drowned in story at the expense of any memorable action scenes.

There wasn't one decent sword fight in the whole movie. Too many effects-laden duels amid giant explosions and stormy CGI, not enough Blacksmith's shop or pirate cove. Man, that fight at the end of Black Pearl is better than anything in both sequels. As for what was good, the bit where the boat sailed to the end of the world was taken almost shot-by-shot from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. The "maelstrom" sequence was just a typical contemporary wall of sound and cgi images designed to wow by overwhelming. There wasn't any character in it, just Jack spinning around on ropes and swinging into guys. It made me think of the Sandman bit in the last Spiderman movie (which sucked).

And: when did Jack Sparrow learn to fly (no puns, please)? In the last film, there were all these bits with characters rolling around inside giant balls; in this one, Sparrow is spinning around on ropes everywhere he goes. In the end, he escapes a typhoon by parasailing through it. It's utter nonsense.

Lost from both sequels was any genuine sense of peril; the stakes were so ridiculously high that you just had to believe that physics don't apply to the main characters, and that physical harm in their cases is impossible. Frankly when whatsisname gets it at the end I almost laughed "Like THAT could kill an unstoppable superhero!" It seemed inexplicable that it could, but suddenly he was vulnerable to physical harm just because the story demanded it. Suddenly bringing mortality and death to what had been for more than an hour an impossible cartoon seemed frankly out of place.

As for the fish pirates, a big deal was made of them in the middle film, while in this one they're replaced by the East India Trading Company, whose agents we're barely introduced to. I didn't really get a sense of a villain, unlike in say the first one, where Barbossa was this undead hellion whose curse was explained just well enough to make his death almost tragic. Brining him back to life in the sequels of course ruins the poignacy of that, like killing Newt in Alien 3 ruined the heroism of her rescue in Aliens. These are sequels of that variety that cheapen the first film. I won't buy them, and like the Alien sequels I'll pretend they were never made.

PS: In the first film, while Jack seemed like a bad guy for a lot of it, ultimately he had everyone's best interests at heart. In the sequels he's a real bastard, willing to doom his so-called friend to tortured immortality just so he can free himself from some terrible arrangement he made in the backstory to the second film (in the second one, he was enlisted strngers to death for his own profit ... for shame!). And seeing triple of him just stretched the whole "Jack is crazy" joke too thin. These sequels have no repeat viewability, while the first is a gem I could watch any rainy day.

PPS: No, I didn't think the monkey with the fireworks was funny. For one thing, Oriental fireworks factories exploding at the climax of action scenes is way too tired even to be called a cliche. And two, I pretty much never laugh at monkeys. They're played out.

PPPS: I edited the topic subtitle to indicate that this thread contains spoilers.

This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 13 June 2007 - 12:26 AM

[Commodore]

MyPantsAreOnFire has the right of it; this is a classic case of 'Matrix Syndrome'. A decent movie becomes a surprise hit and the filmmakers start seeing dollar signs. They drag a premise that was only supposed to last for one movie into an 'epic trilogy' that loses all of the brains and charm of the original, instead opting for ever-flashier visual effects and an elaborate plot. I liked some aspects of At World's End, but all in all I judge the trilogy a failure because it was never supposed to be a trilogy in the first place.

On a side note, I also dislike how PotC has made pirates and piracy into a commercial fad. Some of us who were really into pirate history before Curse of the Black Pearl came out are a tad annoyed by all the fanpeople who think that PotC is somehow an accurate representation of pirates.

[Jane Sherwood]

...You people just make me tired. I'm serious, at this point I just want to scream, "You know what? YOU TRY IT! You fucking write something better! GO ON! I'd seriously LOVE to see you try! I eagerly await your scripts!" God knows over 300,000 attempts haven't already been made! And 98% of them are shit.

On a side note, I also dislike how PotC has made pirates and piracy into a commercial fad. Some of us who were really into pirate history before Curse of the Black Pearl came out are a tad annoyed by all the fanpeople who think that PotC is somehow an accurate representation of pirates.

Oh, because it's impossible for a person to enjoy both fictional and factual pirates, or even recognize the difference between the two. Or enjoying a fictional account couldn't possibly intellectually stimulate anyone into researching history.

If PotC pisses you off because it doesn't accurately represent pirates, then something like Monkey Island must drive you absolutely mad.

People liked pirates, real and fictional, before the PotC came out.

This post has been edited by Jane Sherwood: 13 June 2007 - 02:13 PM

[MyPantsAreOnFire]

...You people just make me tired. I'm serious, at this point I just want to scream, "You know what? YOU TRY IT! You fucking write something better! GO ON! I'd seriously LOVE to see you try! I eagerly await your scripts!" God knows over 300,000 attempts haven't already been made! And 98% of them are shit.

Yes, and 2 out of that 98% were made into the PotC sequels.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. It's not difficult to write film scripts, and just because someone did managae to write one and get it made doesn't mean it should be any good. I'm not saying I could do a better job with these films because I think it was foolish to stretch such a thin first film into a trilogy in the first place and I don't know if anyone could have made the sequels work.

Commodore put it great...some movies are meant to just be singular entities...PotC was one of those. It had a lot of charm and was great fun and just generally enjoyable to watch. Nothing in it, however, indicated that there needed to be sequels made, or that decent sequels could even be made in the first place. The meandering and bloated messes of the sequels indicate to me that my hunch was right on.

[Commodore]

People liked pirates, real and fictional, before the PotC came out.

I am well aware of that, since I am one of them. What I don't like (and I thought I made this pretty clear) is how commercialized the whole thing has become, with pirate merchandise in every store and pirate flags on ever T-shirt. It bothers me that something I have always loved has become a cheap, commercialized fad. That's all.

[civilian_number_two]

...You people just make me tired. I'm serious, at this point I just want to scream, "You know what? YOU TRY IT! You fucking write something better! GO ON! I'd seriously LOVE to see you try! I eagerly await your scripts!" God knows over 300,000 attempts haven't already been made! And 98% of them are shit.

I appreciate that you're tired Janey, and that in your fatigue you regurgitated the dumbest argument in the history of criticism. I won't hold it against you, but here's the tired retort:

I think The STAR WARS prequels are awful. I don't have the time or maybe the talent to write "better" ones. If you think I'm not entitled to think that way, then neither are you. You must therefore love the STAR WARS prequels with a resigned dignity, because they clearly are the product of genius far superior to your own. After all, they got made into international blockbuster hits; what have you ever done?

Dumb retort aside, I hated that Jack could fly in this movie. Probably as much as I'd have hated flying R2D2, had I ever seen that. And I hated the fake love triangle, and all the artificial misunderstandings and absurd doublecrosses. I hated how they made a big deal out of how unstealable the Heart in the box was, and then Jack just walks in ad takes it by getting the guards to talk to one another. I hated that they were the same guys from the first movie. I hated that Barbossa's talisman was Ragetti's eyeball - that's just stupid. I hated the multiple angel/devil Jacks, and I don't know about New Orleans, but noone in Vancouver was lauging during the whole "Captain Jack in the big white room" sequence, where the ship is run by lots of Johnny Depps. I'm pretty sure that bit was supposed to be funny. I hated the whole Calypso storyline, and I especailly hated how all of the jumbled nonsesne of this film buried the significance of everything that had been set up in the second, like the importance of Davy Jones as a villain. In this one I think we saw him twice. In that regard it really felt like The Matrix to me.

The only thing I actually liked was Will and Elizabeth getting married during a swordfight. I thought, "well, ok; I haven't seen this before," and the whole bit looked nice and felt like the ending of a better movie. Too bad it was Barbossa, the great villain from the first film, neutered by resurrection in the second, who married them and not Jack, or maybe Norrington (whose partial mutiny was about the dumbest thing in the film; he had to know that meant death, so why didn't he go all the way and flee the ship? It's like the writers had no further use for the guy, so they thought they'd kill him like whatsisname in Last of the Mohicans ... this was not Last of the Mohicans. Only characters in fiction are so cavalier with their own lives ... Arg... it hurts just thinking about it). Speaking of Barbossa, this was like the Matrix: remember how Smith was destroyed at the end of the first one, and then they brought him back in the sequels? No way they planned that all along, and his use in the followups was less interesting that his original use. So too Barbossa: when they killed him, no way they planned to make him a necessary element in restoring Calypso to the sea, one of nine Pirate Lords who gather periodically for secret counsels, etc etc (wasn't he Jack's First Mate? If he was really this Pirate Lord, shouldn't Jack have seen that mutiny and doublecross coming? Why did we have to wait three films to have braggart Jack ever mention his involvement in this secret society?). Ah, it was just overwhelming; if taken seriously it changes for the worse the way you watch the first film, and that's no good at all.

But that's just my opinion. Feel free to like it, but don't ask me to challenge it with fan fiction. That's just silly, but again, I know you're tired.

[Jane Sherwood]

That was...

That was a personal low for me. I'm sorry.

[Spoon Poetic]

I just wanted to point out that pirates were highly commercialized before the first movie was ever even written. Charleston, Myrtle Beach, the Bahamas, any beach town, commercial strip on/near a beach, or even places an hour or so away from the beach ALWAYS have had a ton of pirate stuff there. The ride the movies were based on was made because pirates were cool. I really haven't seen that much of a rise in pirate things selling. Maybe in Hot Topic, but things people associate with pirates (skull/crossbones, etc) was cool in the goth/punk (and poseur) culture before the movies, too. I dunno, I just don't think it's that big of a deal.

But those Star Wars movies, man - makes me irate how just because of those movies, the commercial popularity and sales of spaceships is so huge!

This post has been edited by Spoon Poetic: 14 June 2007 - 03:50 PM

[Lord Aquaman]

MyPantsAreOnFire has the right of it; this is a classic case of 'Matrix Syndrome'. A decent movie becomes a surprise hit and the filmmakers start seeing dollar signs. They drag a premise that was only supposed to last for one movie into an 'epic trilogy' that loses all of the brains and charm of the original, instead opting for ever-flashier visual effects and an elaborate plot. I liked some aspects of At World's End, but all in all I judge the trilogy a failure because it was never supposed to be a trilogy in the first place.

On a side note, I also dislike how PotC has made pirates and piracy into a commercial fad. Some of us who were really into pirate history before Curse of the Black Pearl came out are a tad annoyed by all the fanpeople who think that PotC is somehow an accurate representation of pirates.

You know another film series that suffered from 'The Matrix Syndrome'? Highlander (1985). Highlander 1 clearly was meant to be a one time kind of film - Hell, it ended with the Highlander winning the friggin' prize! - but then you get Highlander 2, 3, 4/Endgame, a 5th one/the Source due out like next year or something and what, 2 different TV shows plus an animated series?

[Commodore]

I just wanted to point out that pirates were highly commercialized before the first movie was ever even written. Charleston, Myrtle Beach, the Bahamas, any beach town, commercial strip on/near a beach, or even places an hour or so away from the beach ALWAYS have had a ton of pirate stuff there. The ride the movies were based on was made because pirates were cool. I really haven't seen that much of a rise in pirate things selling. Maybe in Hot Topic, but things people associate with pirates (skull/crossbones, etc) was cool in the goth/punk (and poseur) culture before the movies, too. I dunno, I just don't think it's that big of a deal.

But those Star Wars movies, man - makes me irate how just because of those movies, the commercial popularity and sales of spaceships is so huge!

There's a big difference between some beach towns in the Caribbean selling pirate stuff and pirate flags turning up on T-shirts at Target. I just don't care for it is all.

[civilian_number_two]

Well, in defence of folks interested in Pirates, the murderous thieving goons, high on rum at the best of times, were instrumental in forging the trade routes of the 17th and 18th centuries. Many were so good at hitting trading vessels of foreign powers that they were made knights in their own lands. They're intersting characters of history, and no worse or better than any other violent conqueror. A lot of the fellows immortalised as "explorers" were genocidal and far worse than the simple thieves that a lot of the pirates were.

I rather doubt that kids wearing pirate tees will lead to an increase in pre-school violence and theft. While you're at it, Ms Gore, you might as well blame video games or Metallica.

[Spoon Poetic]

Those cities aren't in the Caribbean...

And I'm pretty sure there were pirate shirts in Target/other stores every once in a while before the movies, too. Pirates have always been cool, even before this movie, and people have always bought pirate merchandise.

Civ, who were you directing your "Ms. Gore" retort to? I think I totally missed something here.

[Jane Sherwood]

Oooh...Random, Barely-Connected Train-of-Thought Post:

Here's a thought: Did pirate merchandising become extra popular after PotC came out, or was it always there, but never completely caught your attention until after PotC came out?

Think about it.

I've found that a lot of stuff like this is sort of like a hearing a new word - you never notice it or think twice about it at first, but after you learn what it means, suddenly you hear and read it everywhere.
------
Pirates of the Caribbean is now to the pirate fiction genre (for lack of a better term at the moment) as Doctor Who, Star Trek, and Star Wars are to the science fiction genre.
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Lake Charles is hardly a beach town, and every May we have the pirate-themed Contraband Days festival. It's supposed to be about pirates and Jean Lefeat and whatnot, but really it's a mildly piratey parade, followed by your typical, run-of-the-mill redneck carnival, only the Confederate flags are replaced with Jolly Rogers.)
------
Heheh...I remember a fifth-grade field trip to Charleston to see all that stuff after my class read Mystery of the Pirate's Treasure. Stede Bonnet was a silly, silly man...I like him.



ADDITIONAL: Damn...I actually started typing this not long after Commodore posted. I need to write faster! Or not get distracted or called away every few minutes.

This post has been edited by Jane Sherwood: 16 June 2007 - 04:31 PM

[civilian_number_two]

Civ, who were you directing your "Ms. Gore" retort to? I think I totally missed something here.

I was directing that line to Commodore. Unless I misunderstood him/her, the complaint was that Pirate merchandise trivialises the history of Pirates, so kids will take violence less seriously. Hence my crack about Tipper Gore. If you all recall, before Al Gore was famous for trying to save the environment, and before he tried to be President, he was famous for being the husband of some right-wing nutbag who made outrageous claims about the effects of rock music.

Anyway, back on the original topic: the new Pirates movie sucked.