Disneyland: The Movie - POTC: AT WORLD'S END

In recognition of Walt Disney Pictures' new film, TOMORROWLAND, more or less "based" on the futuristic themed land in Disney theme parks, I'm taking a look back at the films based on or inspired by Disneyland attractions.

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END
Genre: Action-Adventure, Fantasy
Released 25 May 2007
Directed by Gore Verbinski
Starring: Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Geoffrey Rush, Jack Davenport, Bill Nighy, Jonathan Pryce, Lee Arenberg, Mackenzie Crook, Kevin R. McNally, Chow Yun-fat, Tom Hollander, Stellan Skarsgard, Naomie Harris, David Bailie, Marty Klebba, David Schofield, Keith Richards, Reggie Lee
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action/adventure violence and some frightening images.
169 minutes

I have a particular affinity for PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END.  It's no masterpiece, I know, but  I enjoy it even more than THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL.  It's unique, a movie torn between a wacky pirate adventure and a mythic epic with would-be gravitas, and while it never it quite satisfies on one or the other count, the result is an entertaining enough concoction on its own with a lot of high highs, plenty of gonzo humor, and spectacle to spare.  At 2 hours and 50 minutes, it could definitely be a lot tighter, and as usual, the Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio script is terrifically convoluted, but it thrills where it really matters with copious entertainment value.
In opting for a three-film narrative structure rather than the more logical stand-alone adventure style of Indiana Jones or James Bond, Elliot and Rossio, perhaps inadvertently, came to emulate the original Star Wars trilogy.  THE CURSE OF... was created as a stand-alone adventure, then retroactively made the first part of three acts, and works better on its own than its counterparts do.  It's the breeziest of the three.  DEAD MAN'S CHEST is a "dark sequel", clearly comparable to THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK in its place within the trilogy, with loosely similar plots in which the film's hero (equating Jack Sparrow to Han Solo) finds himself in peril of an unpaid debt to a merciless creditor (Davy Jones and Jabba the Hutt).  DEAD MAN'S CHEST ends on a downbeat note, as the remaining heroes prepare to rescue their fallen comrade.  This leaves it up to the third and final chapter of the trilogy to fulfill two obligations to the larger story; the rescue, repairing the damage done by the loss in the second film, then completing the journey at large to finish the trilogy.
AT WORLD'S END reintroduces Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) and Will Turner (Orlando Bloom), both of them now hard-edged pirates, on a mission with the resurrected Captain Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) and the crew of the Black Pearl on a mission in Singapore, where the waters are ruled by the Pirate Lord of the South China Sea, Sao Feng (Chow Yun-fat).  After striking a deal with Feng for ancient navigational charts that hold the secret to finding Davy Jones' Locker at the edge of the world, where Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) and the Black Pearl have been taken into purgatory, they sail over the literal edge of the world, where the seas pour over over the side in a massive waterfall.  When they find Jack, he's been driven mad by the emptiness of the Locker, surrounded by duplications of himself, and once sprung and back on the open seas, he is obsessed with achieving immortality and never facing his own death again.  Barbossa is intent on uniting the nine pirate lords of the seven seas in a Brethren Court to deal with the threat of the East India Trading Company that has begun stamping all pirates and all who associate with pirates.  Through the Court, the pirates can release Calypso, a heathen goddess imprisoned in a human form by the first Brethren Court, but who Barbossa believes will help them against the EITC, and Jack, the Pirate Lord of the Caribbean, is not eager to re-enter the fray.  Jack instead plots to kill Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), now enslaved to do the bidding of the EITC's chairman, Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander), and take his place as the immortal captain of The Flying Dutchman.  Will also wants to kill Jones, but in order to free his father, Bootstrap Bill (Stellan Skarsgard), from his eternal damnation aboard the Dutchman, while he finds himself torn between his commitment to his father and his love for Elizabeth.  Finally, these criss-crossing motivations are brought to a collective head in a spectacular showdown between the pirates of the Brethren Court and the EITC, where fates are met and destinies realized.

Even for a nearly three-hour running time, it's a ton of plot, much of which is fairly aimless and confused, no doubt due to the fact that the production began shooting without a finished script, so Elliot and Rossio were on location making it up as they went along.  The film went about $75 million over budget, for an estimated grand total of $300 million, which stood as the most expensive film production of all time, even adjusted for inflation, until the fourth in the series in 2011, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES, surpassed it with an obscene $378 million budget.  In the case of AT WORLD'S END, which was initially approved as part of a two-film budget of $450 million, or $225 million a piece, the budget overruns were largely due to the rushed and poorly managed production, which resulted in creating massive and expensive set-pieces as they went along, and overtime pay for the substantial post-production special effects that had to be finished in time for the film's Memorial Day weekend release.  DEAD MAN'S CHEST had been hyped up for months prior to its release, but as the crew hurried to finish the film, the marketing campaign was practically non-existent up until two months before the premiere when the first trailer was released.  In contrast, the average blockbuster, as with DEAD MAN'S CHEST, almost always premieres its first trailer at least six months before release, in order to make time to build up the hype.  AT WORLD'S END was a movie that barely made to the finish line.  While the profit margins were probably less than they could have been, AT WORLD'S END was nonetheless a resounding success that pulled in $963.4 million at the international box office to make it the #1 movie of 2007.

It's easy to pick out AT WORLD'S END's flaws, but that would be to miss the forest for the trees.  It's a spectacular and spectacularly weird film, interwoven with peanut-based non sequiturs, double crosses, mid-battle weddings, an exceptional musical score and one of the most astounding action set-pieces ever committed to film.  The climactic battle between the Black Pearl and The Flying Dutchman inside a maelstrom, aka giant-ass whirlpool, is a wonder to behold and a dream come true for anyone who once was a boy who fantasized about pirate adventures.  Filmed on full-sized ship sets fixed atop hydraulic motors that tipped them into angles inside a huge hangar, with cold water dousing the cast who wore wetsuits under their costumes, with the massive whirlpool surroundings and other digital effects added in by Industrial Light & Magic and Digital Domain, the climactic action sequence alone makes the movie worth it and delivers in every way it should.  There are pirates swinging on ropes across the swirling waters to the other ships while swinging swords and firing pistols at each other.  That's awesome. 

It's a definite improvement on DEAD MAN'S CHEST, with a lot more fun and comedy, and Verbinski, Elliot and Rossio find the sweet spot for their darkly comedic fantasy tone without the meanness of DEAD MAN'S CHEST.  It has a goofy and gross sense of humor, such as a hilarious bit when, sailing through an Arctic region, a pirate attempts to rub some warmth into his frozen foot and accidentally breaks off his big toe, or a bizarre moment when a hallucination of Jack Sparrow plucks his brain out from his skull and licks it.  Why not?  This movie is often as insane as its leading man, post-Davy Jones' Locker.
When presented with the opportunity to follow-up the success of THE CURSE OF THE OF THE BLACK PEARL, Verbinski, Elliot and Rossio made the decision to retroactively create a three-part epic story, and while stand-alone adventures would probably have been more ideal for the series, the weird and improbable route they took works in its own way.  Verbinski, who followed the trilogy with the 2011 animated western comedy RANGO and Disney's somewhat underrated 2013 big budget western action flop, THE LONE RANGER, creates out of AT WORLD'S END a movie that is a pirate adventure in its trappings, but a spaghetti western at its heart.  Pirates are the gunfighters and cowboys of the frontier, and the East India Trading Company and British Navy are the ruthless railroad barons that bring order at a costly price.  Hearkening back to the greatest of the spaghetti westerns, ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (sorry, Dollars Trilogy fans), Davy Jones is the equivalent of Henry Fonda's "Frank", the gunfighter wrangled into fighting for the barons he despises, but a "black hat" nonetheless.

The western parallels are no more clear than in the "parley" scene, as Elizabeth, Jack and Barbossa meet with Beckett, Jones and Will on a sandbar prior to battle, with a Morricone-influenced electric guitar solo variation on one of the film's themes, the guitar played by director Gore Verbinski himself.  The score, composed by Hans Zimmer (with the main theme, "He's a Pirate", composed for the first film in the series by Klaus Badelt, in collaboration with Zimmer), is the best of the series, grandiose and resplendently romantic, especially in the primary new theme for AT WORLD'S END, "Up is Down". 
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL was a smash hit of unexpected proportions.  No sequel had been planned, but the subtitle had been added just in case, setting up expectations for the $140 million-budgeted blockbuster, but when it became the highest-grossing live-action film ever released by Disney, it didn't take long for the studio to finance two sequels at a massive combined budget of $450 million.  Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio were faced with the choice of writing the series in the direction of stand-alone adventures (i.e. James Bond, Indiana Jones) or as a retroactive trilogy, integrating the first film into a larger, three-part narrative.  As mentioned before, Elliot and Rossio took the unlikely route of a trilogy.  As a result, DEAD MAN'S CHEST and AT WORLD'S END are clearly companion films, while THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL is a bit of an outlier, but taken all three together, they make an interesting narrative.  As with the first film alone, the trilogy is Will and Elizabeth's story, and Jack is a drunken titan of personality stumbling through their tale, sometimes bringing the story along, but more often manipulating it to his own ends.  The traditional three-act structure holds that the first act sets up the world, the character and a course of events; the second act brings about a culmination of those events.  The third act is a recovering from the second act culmination, then rebuilding to the grand climax.  A third act should hearken back to the first act, reminiscing on what came before, testing everything that the first set its sights on.  Looking back on THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL, Will comes along way from being the blacksmith with a stick up his ass to not only a swaggering pirate, as he is in most of AT WORLD'S END, but ultimately taking the role of Davy Jones, ferrying the souls of those lost at sea into the next life.  Elizabeth, the governor's daughter who dreams of adventure and pirates, has become the Pirate King and leads the pirates of the Seven Seas into battle against the ultimate symbol of civilized order and repression.  Jack..., well, Jack has changed very little, but once again, he's robbed of the Black Pearl and throwing back a bottle of rum.
It's a fitting conclusion to Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, as Jack Sparrow sails for the Fountain of Youth and immortality in Florida, where today he plays host to millions of park guests at Walt Disney World every year.

Scraping the Barrel for Theme Park Homages
By the time they got to the third movie, Elliot and Rossio had pretty much used up most of the material from Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean that they could figure how to work into the film series, so AT WORLD'S END is pretty light on the references, but they're not altogether dried up yet:

• Down the Waterfall: Arriving at the literal "world's end", where the horizon ceases and the seas spill over the edge in a colossal waterfall, Barbossa speaks a line of dialogue from the talking skull that addresses guests prior to going down the waterfall in the ride, warning, "You may not survive to pass this way again, and these be the last friendly words you'll hear."  The ship then plunges over the edge, down the waterfall, and the screen goes dark while a few short pieces of actual audio from the original attraction are heard.  The waterfall from the ride was initially intended to be referenced in THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL, with Jack and Will taking a boat down a flume into the pirates' grotto on Isla de Meurta, before the concept was cut in order to distance the film from its theme park origins in addition to budgetary reasons.
• "It be too late to alter course now mateys!": Barbossa speaks this line, also spoken by the talking skull in the attraction, when steering the Black Pearl into the maelstrom in the climactic action sequence.
• "Yo Ho (A Pirate's Life for Me): The theme song from the theme park attraction, written by X Atencio and George Bruns, is briefly sung in part by characters in the film.
• The Fountain of Youth: The film concludes with Jack Sparrow sailing a dingy into the horizon in search of the Fountain of Youth and immortality in Florida, arguably a subtle reference to his appearance in Walt Disney World's Pirates of the Caribbean in Florida, captured in immortality in audio-animatronic form.

Top 5 of PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END

1. Maelstrom Battle - For better or worse (I'll argue for better), the climactic battle of this film is some of the biggest, grandest action ever rendered onscreen and the stuff of boyhood imagination.  It's spectacle in every sense, the kind that requires propping up two full-sized ships on motorized fixtures, dousing the sets and cast in thousands of gallons of cold water, and employing more man hours at Industrial Light & Magic than had been since RETURN OF THE JEDI in 1984.  Plus there's a mid-battle wedding!  
2. Musical Score - All of the POTC movies to date have had wonderful musical scores, but AT WORLD'S END is one of the best I've heard in any movie, one that enhances the action onscreen and makes the emotions soar, and is no less enjoyable listening on its own.
3. "Up is Down" - An impressive set-piece outside of a conflict, accompanied by Zimmer's stellar theme, with the engaging visual of people rocking a ship back and forth so hard that it flips upside down, with a little bit of dark humor mixed in.
4. "Depends on the Day" - Will and Elizabeth's conclusion is bittersweet, more sweet than bitter, with Will saved from a mortal wound but tasked to ferry souls lost at sea with only one day to be with Elizabeth every ten years.  They finally get their big romantic union on a beach, and while it may have been funny to imply their lovemaking by showing the Dead Man's Chest (now containing Will's still-beating heart) thumping rapidly, the earnest approach works too.  The sunset, the music, Orlando Bloom making out with Keira Knightley's gorgeous leg; it's all there.
5. Humor - The comedic aspects of AT WORLD'S END are largely in the form of non sequiturs and goofy dark humor that matches the series' increasing zaniness, among the best moments including: upon seeing spirits floating in the waters of the underworld, Pintel and Ragetti wonder aloud "What would happen if you dropped a cannonball on one of them?"  Also, "Shipwreck Island, where lie Shipwreck Cove in the town of Shipwreck," and the running gag on peanuts.  I love this movie.