PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES
Released 20 May 2011
Directed by Rob Marshall
Screenplay by Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio
Starring: Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Geoffrey Rush, Ian McShane, Kevin McNally, Sam Claflin, Atrid Berges-Frisbey, Stephen Graham, Keith Richards, Richard Griffiths, Greg Ellis, Damian O'Hare, Oscar Jaenada, Anton Lesser, Ian Mercer, Paul Bazely
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action/adventure violence, some frightening images, sensuality and innuendo.
136 minutes
Production Cost: $378.5 million
Domestic Gross: $241 million
Worldwide Gross: $1.045 billion
I'm in a weird place about PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES. When I first saw it in theaters, at a 3D midnight screening in 2011, it had been getting pretty bad reviews, and I was struggling to reconcile my own excitement with the negative consensus. I'm definitely not a "the critics are always wrong" type of guy, or "they only like serious/artsy movies," and I usually agree with the average critics' ratings on review aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic. At least, I used to usually agree with them. Lately, I feel myself deviating from that course more and more, at least in terms of finding more enjoyment in movies that stand out from the crowd for better or worse, even if they're admittedly not the sharpest or deepest movies around. I like the sharp and deep movies too, but I don't know; lately there are a lot of movies that I hate and get good reviews, and movies that I love that get bad reviews. More than there used to be. There will always be a minority opinion, because there's always someone who enjoys the most universally loathed movie, and there's always someone who just doesn't get the most universally loved movie. That's why it's ridiculous when people complain about the one or two critics who gave a negative review to something like TOY STORY 3, ruining what could have been a perfect 100% Rotten Tomatoes score. There are an awful lot of legitimate published critics who aren't on Rotten Tomatoes, but who could still dislike that 100% rated movie or love that 0% rated movie. It doesn't matter. And in terms of Rotten Tomatoes, people often leave out the average score next to the percentage of critics who liked the movie, and that's arguably more important. In any case, even as I watch ON STRANGER TIDES, knowing the beating that critics were dealing to it, I could tell fairly well why most of them didn't like it, but it didn't stop me from enjoying it. The friend I went to see the movie with told me I was "biased", which didn't make sense, because all opinions about movies are objective, but I can kind of see where he was coming from. Even if I try not to be, I'm pretty much a die-hard POTC fan, and I saw ON STRANGER TIDES several more times before I was able to be honest with myself about how bad it was. Still, several years later when it was available on Blu-ray for only $9.99, I debated with myself for a minute (knowing full well that I'd be made fun of a bit) before buying it. The thing is, I may roll my eyes at belabored scenes, forced dialogue and the neutering of the Jack Sparrow character in a leading role, but it doesn't bore me. I sort of enjoy it. I can't think of a lot of movies that truly fit as a "guilty pleasure" for me, but ON STRANGER TIDES is one. I wouldn't recommend it to people, and I'm going to argue why it's bad and shouldn't be liked, but on my own, I can work with it. But yeah, it's the bad one of the series.
THE MOST EXPENSIVE MOVIE EVER MADE
Pirate movies are expensive. Most of that stuff isn't already there and ready to use like with contemporary-set movies. You have to build an early 18th-century world, and you either build or buy ships, but you'll usually be filming on the water, which presents a whole new set of difficulties regarding weather, not to mention the fact that the entire set is in a constant state of motion. You also have to have costumes, props, special effects and stunts, and it quickly adds up. When THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL was set at a budget of $140 million, the cost was a source of major consternation for Disney CEO Michael Eisner who was notorious for cutting costs, but that time, two of the main ships weren't even full built. The
Black Pearl and Commodore Norrington's flagship, the
Dauntless, were built on top of barges as only the bow, the top deck, the rigging and sails, while most of the ships' masses were added in with CGI. The other ship in the movie, the
Interceptor, was colonial sailing ship replica that was redressed for the movie, and in a scene depicting the ship sailing through a storm, a miniature was used (and, let's be honest, you can tell). After the first movie proved it was financially viable, costs exploded on the sequels, where DEAD MAN'S CHEST cost $225 million and AT WORLD'S END more than doubled the cost of the original at an estimated $300 million. Hollywood finances are kind of hazy, because studios deliberately manipulate the numbers (legally, I suppose?) to get the greatest portions of profit-sharing agreements possible, and you rarely get any sort of exact number on the cost of a movie. $300 million is sort of a rough guess, but the original cost of AT WORLD'S END was meant to be closer to $225, but the movie went through frequent rewrites and visual effects artists were working overtime to get the movie finished on schedule. That doesn't even include costs of marketing the film and distribution, but the movie made plenty of money back with a gross of $963 million, and that's not even including merchandise sales and what it contributed to the theme parks. Even still, $300 million made AT WORLD'S END the most expensive movie ever made by a substantial margin, even after adjusting for inflation, and there's still a question as to how accurate that number is. By appearances, it may very well have cost more, but maybe Gore Verbinski and his crew just used their money with uncommon efficiency. When ON STRANGER TIDES was being made though, much was made of the movie being shrunken down from what had come before, cut not only in costs, but also in run time and plot machinations. AT WORLD'S END had been plenty lucrative for Disney, in spite of its budget, but grossing that much money without spending that much money would naturally be a preferable business model. Besides the financial aspects, the series didn't have anywhere to go but smaller. There had been gigantic, ship-shattering Kraken attacks and a massive battle between ships inside of a gigantic whirlpool. Trying anything larger would turn the whole thing into parody, like getting a 100 oz. soft drink at McDonalds. It sound funny and cool, but really, it's impractical and there's not much of a point to it. So they took the series in a smaller direction and reported a budget of $250 million, which is still ginormous by most standards, but less than $300 million. It turned out though that the acknowledged number wasn't quite accurate, when British film industry tax rebates revealed that it had actually cost a record-smashing $378.5 million, or $410.6 million before the rebate. But then you look at ON STRANGER TIDES and you look at AT WORLD'S END, and one costs $378 million and other costs $300 million, and the numbers seem switched around. You can tell ON STRANGER TIDES cost a lot of money just because it does have a number of large sets, plentiful visual effects, filmed in the jungle with bulky 3D cameras and paid Johnny Depp an obscene $50 million paycheck, but even then, $250 million would seem like a little much, and director Rob Marshall clearly does not film to get the biggest bang for a buck. Director of photography Darius Wolski returned for the movie, and with Verbinski had made the first three movies look awesome, but it does not carry over to the fourth. In the director's commentary for ON STRANGER TIDES, Marshall talks about how great it was that Wolski returned for this movie and how he didn't try to push what he had done with Verbinski onto Marshall, but that doesn't appear to be a good thing. The visual effects mostly look okay (Blackbeard's skeletal had reaching out at the screen 3D-style doesn't look great), but they're not around the level of DEAD MAN'S CHEST and AT WORLD'S END, and the you rarely get the sense of tactility to the sets that the early films had. The
Queen Anne's Revenge looks cool and certainly large, but it's hyper-stylized and seems to be shot fleetingly in a way that makes it feel a bit artificial, and there's all kinds of trouble going on in that Fountain of Youth temple. Depp, who was already raking in the cash like nobody's business, got a $50 million check (not to mention creative control, which was a mistake) to ensure he returned for another outing, because even though I suspect he isn't the only thing keeping these movies afloat, he has been inextricably linked to them for better or worse. Whether they knew it or not when they signed him on though, his star was already starting to teeter off the brink at that point, thanks to milquetoast fare like THE TOURIST and his grotesque Mad Hatter (I don't know, that's where it started to occur to me), and he may have needed this movie at least as much as it needed him. Even with the movie's flabbergasting cost, like the others before it, it made its money back and then some, grossing $1.045 billion worldwide, and that's not including merchandising and home video.
SAILING BEYOND A TRILOGY
When Disney was planning sequels to the original POTC movie, it was decided to retroactively integrate the first movie into a trilogy which would wrap up the story of Will Turner, a blacksmith-turned-pirate who became the Lord of the Seas, and his wife Elizabeth Swan, a governor's daughter-turned-pirate who became the Pirate King of the Brethren Court and Pirate Lord of the South China Sea, whose stories were intertwined with the madcap adventures of Captain Jack Sparrow. With that story resolved (temporarily, it seems) at the end of AT WORLD'S END, the franchise was still too lucrative for Disney to leave it lying there forever. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer suggested that spin-offs might be on the way, i.e. other adventures with Jack Sparrow or background and side stories with other pirates. ON STRANGER TIDES is sort of a spin-off, but not entirely. It's a "stand-alone sequel", I guess, which is basically as much a traditional sequel as it could be, except with only half of the trilogy's main quartet of characters. Johnny Depp had to return, that much was a given, and for the sake of a little more continuity (and because he's just plain fun), Geoffrey Rush did, too. The story is built up from a 1987 novel by Tim Powers called
On Stranger Tides, which gets a "Suggested by" credit, and while I haven't read the book, the connection seems fairly slim. Basically, the book involves a search for the Fountain of Youth, with Blackbeard as the villain, and there are also zombies involved for some reason. I don't know about the book, but the movie is a weird mish-mash overflowing with half-baked concepts that may be an attempt to repeat the earlier movies' '2+2' style of giving the audience information, except that in this case, the answer doesn't matter. The screenplay is still written by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio (it doesn't feel like it), but possibly the strongest creative voice from the first three films, director Gore Verbinski, would not be returning, having sufficiently blown his load already. Most directors, if they commit to doing more than one movie inside a series or franchise, rarely go beyond three (Michael Bay, on his fifth goddamn Transformers movie, is the exception), and Verbinski was already working on an animated film with Johnny Depp, that being RANGO, so Rob Marshall was brought on as director. Marshall is a weird choice, but then again, Verbinski was a weird choice when he first came on. Marshall is most closely associated with musicals, having begun his career as a choreographer, and after a few TV movies, his first theatrically released directorial feature was CHICAGO in 2002, which scored him an Academy Award nomination for Best Director (the award was won by Roman Polanski for THE PIANIST). He'd also done the historical melodrama MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA, and his most recent movie had been the critically dismissed box office flop NINE, which nonetheless got Penelope Cruz an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress (the award was won by Mo'Nique for PRECIOUS). So he has some credentials, but they're pretty well mixed. Naturally, the connection to be made is that he's a choreographer and has put together spectacular musical dance sequences, so that should translate to swordfights and other such pirate-y action, and the some of the swordfights are solid, but overall, it's an obvious step down from Verbinski. Again, it's weird that the cinematographer Darius Wolski carried over, because the look of the movie and where they put the camera feels so much less...adept.
The idea of the Fountain of Youth had been floated before, back when ideas were being pitched for sequels immediately following the success of the first movie, and of course it had been teased at the end of AT WORLD'S END as a plan B for Jack Sparrow, after that whole gaining immortality as captain of the
Flying Dutchman thing didn't work out. It wasn't necessarily that there would inevitably be a sequel and it would involve the quest for the Fountain of Youth, but it was simply a fun send-off for the character at the end of a trilogy, sending him off in a dinky little dinghy with his own colors and a bottle of rum in search of another way to live forever. But if you're going to make a sequel anyway, then it makes sense to pick it up from there.
"YOU'VE BROUGHT ME THE WRONG JACK SPARROW."
Remember when talking about THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL when I mentioned that meme of Jack Sparrow that said, "Admit it- these movies would be crap without this guy"? Well, ON STRANGER TIDES is the movie in the series with the most Jack Sparrow, and you know what? The result is crap. To be fair, this is like an imitation of Jack Sparrow compared to the first three movies. With Will and Elizabeth's story resolved for the time being, Jack is being used as a lead character, but Jack isn't a lead character. He's a main character, but not a lead character. Imagine if
The Office were all about Michael Scott, and there were no Pam and Jim. Or if
Friends was only about Ross's monkey. It would be too much of a good thing, or as Gore Verbinski called it, "a garlic milkshake." But it isn't even that, because this Jack Sparrow has been watered down in an attempt to make him a lead character. It's bewildering that the screenplay is written by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, because they should know better, and it's kind of like they
do know better, but they're going with the bad ideas anyway. There are two key moments in ON STRANGER TIDES that, in particular, are really sharp deviations from the Sparrow character, and they drive me nuts (by the way, what was the pirate's reason for using a steering wheel as a belt buckle?): the first is when Jack finds his desire for the Fountain "considerably lessened" because it requires a human sacrifice (this was the guy who tried to sell off William Turner's soul to Davy Jones to settle his debt), and the second is when he admits to Gibbs that he had actual "feelings" for Angelica. Jack enjoys the pleasurable company of women occasionally, but all prior evidence is directly opposed to the idea of even the ability to engage in a romantic relationship. It just doesn't fit with this guy. He's not asexual, but the type of trickster character he's been built as is on a different plane than that. When he was considering tying himself to the
Flying Dutchman to achieve immortality, it was the deficit of rum that concerned him far more than the lack of salty wenches. When Elizabeth is dressed as a man and tells Jack that she's come to find the man she loves, Jack tells her, believing she's a him,
"I'm deeply flattered son, but my first and only love is the sea." It's a homophobic joke, but was the 18th century. The point is, Jack doesn't have feelings like that, and he only has an inkling of a conscience that he'll do anything to overcome much of the time, and they're trying to keep all of the familiar Jack but perverting him with these leading man characteristics that just don't mesh. Then, there's also that scene in King George's palace, where Jack is brought for an offer to guide an expedition to the Fountain, and he spends a weird amount of effort trying to get a pastry from the table. I don't know, it's marginally amusing, how the pastry gets kicked up and stuck on the chandelier, and he grabs it while making his escape, but it also just seems strange. We've seen him eat part of an apple in THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL, and he eats a couple of peanuts and even licks a rock and a brain in AT WORLD'S END, but something about him going after that pastry just seems odd and out of character. It makes me think of the 1997 refurbishment of the Disneyland ride, when they modified some of the stronger implications of rape so that the "Pooped Pirate" (who in the original version spoke lasciviously about a young lady hiding in a barrel behind him) was changed from wanting to "hoist me colors on the likes of that little wench" to being in search of food, and the pirates chasing women on upper tracks were changed so the women were chasing the pirates, who had stolen pies. One of the ride's main creators, Xavier Atencio, derided the changes as "Boy Scouts of the Caribbean," and while I certainly understand the motivation to tone down implications of rape in what's ostensibly a family-aimed attraction (and the original Pooped Pirate vignette really was disturbing), changing the pirates' objectives to food is juvenile and stupid. It doesn't make sense, and it doesn't make sense that Jack Sparrow would go so far out of his way for a pastry. If it was easy pickings, and he just picked off the table, it would make more sense, but this takes the cartooniness of Jack Sparrow in the wrong direction. Pastries, bah!
THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH
Turning the series toward Indiana Jones-style McGuffins like the Fountain of Youth or Poseidon's Trident is a perfectly good idea, but the way they go about it is hugely frustrating (supposedly the Trident is a McGuffin for DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES, despite no mention of it in previews). First off, there's the problem of moving from Jack Sparrow already in the dinghy and en route to the Fountain at the end of AT WORLD'S END to a good starting point for all the characters in ON STRANGER TIDES, but instead of actually addressing that, Elliott and Rossio's script just throws that ending off to a side mention. If they could have possibly born the idea of not giving every second of screen time to Johnny Depp, they could have kept him with a headstart, and he could have come into the story later, like THE FORCE AWAKENS if Luke had shown up a third or a half of the way through. I don't know - I realize he's headlining the whole thing, but to have him show up, remind everyone that he was "hell-bent" on finding the Fountain of Youth and then just leave it as he had given up, thus implying that he had been in the Caribbean on his way to Florida, changed his mind for whatever reason and went all the way back to London instead (the idea of placing the decidedly exotic Jack Sparrow in the muddy but familiar civilized world of London-town is good, though). It's more than a bit much. Then, they overcomplicate the idea of the Fountain to the point that it just seems too complicated to bother, and how the hell did anyone ever figure out how to use it anyway? You have to have these two specific, apparently Spanish-made chalices to get any benefit out of this otherwise ancient relic, and then you have to get a mermaid tear, which is apparently damn near impossible. Even after that, you have to have someone else to sacrifice to the Fountain and you only get what years they have and would have lived. Naturally, they don't want it to be too easy to get immortality from the Fountain, otherwise there'd be a crowd, but they seriously overdid it. Especially with those chalices. What's so special about those chalices? Supposedly Ponce de Leon and some of his men were drinking their ways to a few hundred years via the Fountain, so they must have been really good at getting mermaid tears, even though it's tough enough to get the mermaid without being eaten, and then to get them to cry about anything. It's too much, guys, too much.
MERMAIDS
It's not a 'good' movie, but it's not devoid of worthwhile moments, and the most worthwhile, I think, is the White Cap Bay sequence. Maybe they had a really solid second unit director working on that, but that stuff feels a lot more fun than most of the action. For one, in something that the Verbinski films were very successful, it finally brings a sense of scale and tactility to the grand-sized sets, with a big abandoned lighthouse, and the docks that get dealt a fair bit of destruction. It also brings back some of that Gothic horror and general weirdness, basically turning into a large-scale, visual effects-heavy horror sequence. In particular, introduction of the mermaids introduced as showing up alongside the longboat in the middle of the night and building suspense with Tamara's (a bewitching Gemma Ward, who many, including myself, oddly mistook for Amanda Seyfried at the time) ethereal rendition of
"My Johnny Sailor Bold" as other mermaids begin to gather around the boat before erupting into a violent and slightly zany attack sequence. There's the boat capsizing and a barrel of gunpowder then blasting it up out of the water, and although I initially thought that the Spider-Man-style seaweed-slinging was silly and dumb, but I don't mind it so much anymore. It's not great, but I don't hate it. It's one of the few scenes in the movie where I get a sense of excitement about the environment and the look of things. It feels fun.
BLACKBEARD
Jeez, they were so proud of the fact that Blackbeard was the most purely evil villain they had ever done in the POTC series while they doing press for this. At least, that seemed to be what every clip and featurette of Jerry Bruckheimer seemed to be all about, was him emphasizing how uncomplicatedly evil Blackbeard would be. To be fair, there really is nothing wrong with having a villain who is simply evil, especially in this kind of summer blockbuster (the Joker in THE DARK KNIGHT and other iterations, for instance, or Michael Myers in the non-Rob Zombie version of HALLOWEEN (in contrast to the failed "nuance" of the Rob Zombie version), but it usually isn't a selling point. Like, did they think people were complaining about the villains in the first three movies being too complex? Dumb. In any case, if you're going to go with the 'pure evil' take on a villain, it's a good idea to make up for the lack of moral complexity by giving them an interesting motivation or philosophy or some other sense of purpose, which is not given to Blackbeard. Any reason for interest is placed almost solely upon the shoulders of Ian McShane, who seems to be best known for
Deadwood, but I haven't seen
Deadwood, so if you asked me what he was in, I'd probably tell you HOT ROD, KUNG FU PANDA and AGENT CODY BANKS. He's a good actor, and I don't want to then blame Blackbeard on him, but between his performance and the writing, there isn't much to latch onto. Although members of the Brethren Court in AT WORLD'S END were inspired by specific historical pirates, and there had been references to the "Pirate's Code" as laid down by "Morgan and Bartholomew" (referring to the historical privateer Henry Morgan and the historical pirate Bartholomew Roberts), Blackbeard (along with King George II, played by Richard Griffiths) is the first character in the POTC movies taken from history, although it's obviously a very ahistorical rendition. He has a lot of the trivial details that Elliott and Rossio like to pepper these movies with, such as the smoking fuses in the beard, the line
"If I don't kill a man every now and then, they forget who I am," (an unverified quote attributed to the real-life Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard), and the legend of his death in which his headless body swam around his ship three times. There's no point to having Jack recite the legend of Blackbeard's death, especially considering that Blackbeard clearly isn't dead, and when they're told that they're on Blackbeard's ship, no one responds with any sort of "but he's supposed to be dead" reaction. They just force it in there, because this movie is full of throwaway plot points. Maybe they're trying to do the Star Wars thing, where there's a sense of a larger world beyond the borders of this story, and they actually did that fairly well in the Verbinski movies, but ON STRANGER TIDES all feels like half-measures that never congeal into a whole. Speaking of which- zombies. There were zombies in the book
On Stranger Tides, and there seems to be an obligation to have some form of supernatural pirates, whether they're skeletons, fish-people or zombies, but otherwise, there's no real point to having them here. There's the one scene during the attempted mutiny in which one gets impaled and then dramatically pulls the sword out of his chest, but other than that, they might as well just be big and scary but not supernatural pirates. It does tie into Blackbeard being a practitioner of black magic though, which is a strange and loosely justified aspect of the character in itself. It's mostly so that he can wield his sword (not specified in the movie, but according to the marketing, it's the "Sword of Triton") to animate the ropes on his ship to ensnare sailors (only used in one scene, but referenced in Barbossa's account of the loss of the
Black Pearl and his leg) and operate his ship from ashore during the mermaid scene, and to keep Jack under his thumb for a portion of the movie via a voodoo doll (like the one featured on marketing materials for DEAD MAN'S CHEST). The trouble with voodoo doll acting is that unless you're going to use it for something big, like snapping limbs, or maybe drowning or something, it looks ridiculous and cheap. Blackbeard holds the doll's head over a candle flame, and Jack start holding his head like he has a terrible headache. It's like holding the camera still and having actors throw themselves around to depict an earthquake.
QUEEN ANNE'S REVENGE
So, um, the
Black Pearl, the big main ship of this series, is in a bottle this time around. It's mostly just a simple way of getting Jack away from his ship and onto Blackbeard's, and cutting costs by redressing the ship previously used as the
Black Pearl into Blackbeard's ship, the
Queen Anne's Revenge, and adding a little incentive for Jack to help lead Angelica and Blackbeard to the Fountain. It's in a bottle though, which is strange but also a cool idea, and eventually written off as a gag in what's by far the most lackluster ending in the series. The
Queen Anne's Revenge was a historical ship used by the real Blackbeard as a flagship for only a matter of months before he ran her aground by North Carolina (it's debated whether it was purposeful or an accident), but during that time, he used it in his famous blockade of Charleston harbor. The version in the film, like Ian McShane's Blackbeard, is decidedly ahistorical, although unlike McShane's Blackbeard, it is imposing and interesting. In some ways though, it makes me think of a cool-looking and ornate toy made of flimsy plastic contrasted with the sturdy and practical old version of the same toy. It's very frilly and in spite of the many skulls, it seems like the kind of ship Lord Licorice would from Candyland would have. Blackbeard has a crew, some of them "zombified" and some of them not (although it's unclear why he doesn't simply pick one or the other), although they don't appear to be necessary, because with the Sword of Triton, all its functions are automated. He can fill the sails with wind and aim it in any direction, make it shoot fire from its cannons and make the ropes move all their own (an effect which is hard to see as ever looking quite right, and it looks weirdly cheap here), so I don't know why he needs a crew, but apparently he does. He also sets one on fire. We need to talk about that scene. Jack Sparrow attempts a mutiny, believing that Angelica is pulling a ruse and is actually in sole command of the ship. When Blackbeard comes out of his cabin and snares them all up in the ship's rigging, he decides he can't get rid of the whole crew (why not?) and he can't kill Jack (yeah, I guess that makes sense), so he decides to kill the man who was on watch when the mutiny began. But like with any ridiculous villain, any killing worth doing is worth doing in an obnoxiously overelaborate way. So while only a moment ago, he was just going to shoot a guy with his pistol, he instead has this one man row out in front of the ship in a rowboat. What the man is thinking is going to happen to him is unclear, but he rows out in front of the ship anyway, and then Blackbeard blasts the bejesus out of the little boat and the man inside with a couple of Greek fire cannons. It doesn't establish the Blackbeard character as particularly menacing or threatening as much as he just seems crazy. He just ruined a perfectly good boat. What a moron.
PHILIP & SYRENA
Their part of the movie was pitched as a way to fill the hole left by the absence of Will and Elizabeth, a straight man and lady to balance out the over-the-top antics of Jack and the other pirates, but really, it just winds up being a reminder that 'Oh yeah, Twilight was still pretty big back in 2011.' Sam Claflin, who has since gone on to play Finnick in the Hunger Games series, the Prince in SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN and another character named Philip in the upcoming MY COUSIN RACHEL, plays Philip, a hunky missionary who happens to be tied to the mast of Blackbeard's ship. I do kind of like the idea of throwing a missionary into the mix, just within that historicalish context, but this script is apparently unsatisfied with the idea of just putting in there as a quirk, but not willing to do the work of making it any more worthwhile than that. Doe-eyed French actress Astrid Berges-Frisbey (who just recently had a major role in KING ARTHUR: LEGEND OF THE SWORD) is Syrena, the one mermaid who doesn't want to eat people it seems, or at least she's in love with one of them, for some reason. She tells Philip that he's "different", although it's not clear why. We're just supposed to accept that she got it from his aura while watching him in the midst of her kinfolk's people feast. It all feels very Twilight-y, a simple love story between two very attractive but dull characters, one a human and one a fantasy monster-person, but nobody really cares. Not even the script, really. It ends with Philip, having sustained a presumably fatal wound, running back to the mermaid murder pond, freeing Syrena, who swims off, then comes back. They presumably reconcile, and she takes him underwater with her, maybe to a mermaid kingdom or something, although there's absolutely no suggestion of where she's taking him or why he still won't drown or die from his wounds. Maybe it's just supposed to be that dark. Maybe the idea really is that she just took him down there to eat him, and that's just the way shit goes sometimes. Maybe.
THE SPANISH
Maybe you've heard that line about how in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK Indiana Jones could have just stayed home and the outcome would have been the same? For all the action and mayhem he takes part in in his efforts to obtain the Ark of the Covenant, if he hadn't gotten involved, the Nazis would have just taken the Ark to their secret island base, where they would open it and all be killed by the power of God just the same as they did when Indy was there. To be fair, they probably would have killed Marion to get the headpiece from her, and the Ark wouldn't have wound up stashed away in a government warehouse, but you get the gist. The Nazis would have still opened the Ark and all died, with or without Indy's efforts. Now imagine if Indiana Jones was boring and pointless and showed up at the beginning of the movie, and then showed up occasionally without really doing anything, and then popped up near the end in order to put a bit of a dent in the Ark because he was a Buddhist or something, and that was that? Because that's basically what the Spanish do in ON STRANGER TIDES. Ponce de Leon was a Spanish explorer, so it makes sense that they play some part in all of this, but it ends up being another one of those weird, half-baked plot points that this movie is riddled with.
THE 5 BEST STUFF ABOUT PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES
5. Mermaids Under Sleeping Beauty's Castle - It's a small
thing, but I really like that opening Walt Disney Pictures card with
Hans Zimmer's mermaid theme and the two mermaids leaping out of the
water in front of the castle.
4. "With your permission, Your Heinie..." - It makes me giggle almost every time when Jack addresses King George II as "Your Heinie."
3. Ponce de Leon's Bedchamber - After the first installment,
Gore Verbinski and his crew mostly focused on building the world of the
series from within its original elements rather than drawing on
references and environments from the theme park attraction upon which
the series is ostensibly based. To be fair, they'd used up most of
those ideas in the first round, but Elliott, Rossio and Rob Marshall
managed to wring out a pretty good, clever set piece in Ponce de Leon's
rotting and precariously perched ship modeled after the skeleton
captain's chamber in the Dead Man's Cove section of the ride. Jack and
Barbossa find themselves forced to once again become allies as they
first attempt to fight within the shaky structure without throwing it
off balance and plummeting to destruction, and better than any chemistry
between Jack Sparrow and Angelica is the interplay between Sparrow and
Barbossa.
2. Two Jacks Swordfight & Escape - While I don't care for the dialogue between Angelica and Jack, the swordfight between them at the
Captain's Daughter
tavern, clearly calling back to Jack and Will's fight in THE CURSE OF
THE BLACK PEARL but with a lower lighting with heavy shadows and fire's
glow, is just solid swashbuckling entertainment. You get some pretty
dumb interplay between them and a great moment where he pulls open her
shirt and her bosoms break off the buttons like a cartoon before moving
along to the arrival of more redcoats and Jack and Angelica's escape
under a spray of punctured wine and ale barrels, which is also pretty
fun.
1. Whitecap Bay - I genuinely like the Whitecap Bay scenes, even though the mermaids through seaweed snares that seem a little silly. The stuff in the boat with Scrum and the others attempting to lure a mermaid by singing, floating in a single boat under a lighthouse spotlight on otherwise dark waters is eerie and atmospheric, and the mermaids' ethereal rendition of
"My Johnny Sailor Bold", as more mermaids begin to gather around and under the boat is awesome. The nighttime feeding frenzy is full of exciting and chilling imagery, and the lighthouse and the docks are less crappy-looking than a lot of the other sets. It comes closer to the feeling of a thrill ride and that particular Disneyland sheen than anything else in the movie. I also like the short scene of Barbossa and his crew showing up afterward, with the disgusting, pale rotting mermaid carcass. Ah, good stuff.
THE 5 WORST STUFF ABOUT PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES
5. Captain Teague - It was fun to have Keith Richards cameo in AT WORLD'S END as Jack Sparrow's dad, Captain Teague, but they should have left it at that. Here, he's shoehorned in, Richards is not much of an actor, and he's used for exposition that's repeated later anyway.
4. Blackbeard's Pistols - So Blackbeard wants Jack to jump
off the cliff into the river to get the chalices from Ponce de Leon's
ship, but when Jack refuses, Blackbeard threatens to kill Angelica. But
since Blackbeard wouldn't simply kill his own daughter, I guess, he has
his quartermaster set out a variety of pistols with only two loaded,
like a game of pre-revolver roulette. All to get Jack to eventually
jump off the cliff, because for Blackbeard, nothing can be too
belabored.
3. Gibbs - I don't mind the character Gibbs in the trilogy.
He's not the kind of character who would be anyone's favorite, but he's a
pretty useful way of delivering exposition. It isn't the character in
ON STRANGER TIDES so much that sucks as it's the way he's used and a
couple of moments in particular. For instance, the fact that he steals
the charts from Jack and later that night has them memorized? The first
time I saw the movie, I thought he was supposed to be bluffing, but
then they just carry through with it. The charts, which are supposed to
contain the routes to numerous ancient and mythic locations throughout
the world hidden within its countless combinations of rotating circles,
and Gibbs has it all memorized in a matter of hours. And the way he
says it too;
"I had just enough time to study those infernal circles..."
No, you didn't Gibbs. What a load of crap. Then the part later when
Jack has the chalices and has them tied to a pig which Gibbs holds on a
rope while Jack negotiates with Blackbeard - why the pig? Like, I get
the idea that they're threatening to loose the pig with the chalices
strapped to it, but it hardly seems worth the trouble. Just threaten to
drop them off a cliff or have Gibbs run away with them. Duh.
2. "Only one person alive knows that move." - Jack
realizes that the other Jack is a disguised Angelica after she spins
around in their swordfight, because apparently she's the only person in
the whole friggin' world whose figured out how to do a spin in a
swordfight. It's this that leads Jack to suddenly plant a kiss on her,
based on the certainty that she's the only person who could possibly
spin around in a swordfight. He might have smooched his opponent
anyway, but his justification is absurd.
1. Misuse of Jack Sparrow - This Jack Sparrow is more than a little too selfless, refusing to even entertain the thought of sacrificing someone to steal their years via the Fountain (it probably wouldn't be the worst thing he's done in the series, and even if it were, it wouldn't be far ahead), attempting to claim responsibility for the mutiny before Blackbeard sets the cook on fire, and now he has romantic feelings for a woman? For shame. What happened to the gleefully self-serving, weaselly, black-gutted anti-hero? Ugh.
