Released 25 May 2007
Directed by Gore Verbinski
Screenplay by Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio
Starring: Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Geoffrey Rush, Jack Davenport, Bill Nighy, Tom Hollander, Chow Yun-fat, Jonathan Pryce, Lee Arenberg, Mackenzie Crook, Kevin McNally, Stellan Skarsgard, David Bailie, Naomie Harris, Martin Klebba, Reggie Lee, David Schofield, Angus Barnett, Giles New
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action/adventure violence and some frightening images.
169 minutes
Estimated Production Cost: $300 million
Domestic Box Office Gross: $309.4 million
Worldwide Box Office Gross: $963.4 million
Nominated for 2 Academy Awards
Best Visual Effects (nominated; lost to THE GOLDEN COMPASS)
Best Makeup (nominated; lost to LA VIE EN ROSE)
I absolutely love the hell out of this movie. That's not a popular opinion (or so I've been told) on the third installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, but I do think its assessment among audiences is much more positive than it was among critics who largely gave it mixed-to-negative reviews upon its release in 2007. They were wrong and silly, because PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END is the best in the series and one of the best summer blockbusters ever. The only really significant criticism of it that I have is in its tremendous run time, clocking in at just short of 3 hours. It's really tough to justify a running time much longer than two hours for any movie after the era of roadshow-style exhibitions, and yet, there's no scene of AWE that I don't love on some level or another. It's beautiful, delightfully wacky, exciting and positively unbeatable for spectacle. It's estimated production cost of $300 million made it the most expensive movie ever made until that time (even after accounting for inflation), and it's unlikely that $300 million is a very close estimate, but there's not a cent that doesn't appear onscreen to its greatest potential. It's an unlikely success, rushed in post-production to meet a scheduled release date (the first and only trailer was only just delivered two months before its Memorial Day weekend release), and shooting without a finished script, quite literally making things up as they went along.
"'PIRATES' SECRETS REVEALED: TOP QUESTIONS MOVIEGOERS HAD ABOUT 'PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END" AND REBUTTAL
I don't know if it came with the regular single-disc DVD or the original Blu-ray release, but the 2-disc "Limited Edition" of AT WORLD'S END that I ran out and bought on December 4, 2007, the first day it was in stores, included a section of its DVD guide pamphlet devoted to "Pirates Secrets Revealed: Top Questions Moviegoers Had About PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END". If it wasn't obvious, this is embarrassing and horrible. It's basically an admission that they fouled up the movie, because otherwise, the questions would have been answered in the movie and not in some dumb ol' pamphlet! One of the most frequently occurring complaints about this movie that it was convoluted and confusing, or as the Rotten Tomatoes "Critics Consensus" calls it, "POTC: AWE provides the thrilling action scenes, but mixes in too many characters with too many incomprehensible plot threads." Balderdash. It's convoluted, sure, but that doesn't necessarily make it bad, and the "Critics Consensus" for TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY calls it "a dense puzzle of anxiety, paranoia and espionage that director Tomas Alfredson pieces together with utmost skill," but that movies is confusing as hell. AT WORLD'S END isn't confusing. It's a blast. Were those answers to questions in the DVD pamphlet actually necessary, it would be tragic, but the answers to those questions are already in the movie, so let's take a look at them.
- What does the future hold for Will and Elizabeth? Now that he's captain of the Flying Dutchman, is she going to wait for him? The answer to this is "duh", but the answer the pamphlet gives is "True love never dies but their story is yet to be told." As we now know, the new DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES will continue this narrative, but in AT WORLD'S END itself, the post-credits stinger shows "10 years later" when Will returns to visit Elizabeth, who is waiting there for him, along with their son, Henry. So, yeah. Duh.
- Since Will honored his destiny on the Flying Dutchman, in 10 years does he get to return to land for good, thereby freeing his father and crew? The answer to this is "duh, no," but the pamphlet says, "Every 10 years, Will may step on land for one day. He is bound to the Flying Dutchman forever." I think this was pretty clear in the movie. Jack is debating whether to kill Davy Jones as a way to claim immortality, but as the little Jack on his shoulder points out, "Making port, where we can get rum and salty wenches...once every ten years," to which the little Jack on his other shoulder adds, "Ten years is a long time, mate," and the other little Jack responds that "eternity is longer still". See, it's for eternity (unless someone stabs his heart or however DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES resolves it, assuming it does), with the ability to step on land once every ten years. Duh.
- Why did Calypso explode into crabs? This one is particularly dumb. You might as well ask why do crabs have claws. They just do, okay? What difference does it make? She's a sea goddess who has a crab-shaped music box and had crabs crawling up her dress earlier in the movie, and she can do what ever she wants, so why not explode into crabs? The answer in the pamphlet says, "As a heathen goddess, she's able to take many forms. Since the pirates attributed the crab as her symbol, she chose that form." Duh.
- If Will's father isn't dead and can travel with his son, why can't Elizabeth see Will on the Dutchman? This question makes a little more sense, but even then, it's in the movie. As Bootstrap Bill says, "This ship has a purpose again, and where we are bound, she cannot come." The job of the Flying Dutchman, as Tia Dalma says in the "Dead People in Boats" scene, is to ferry the souls of those lost at sea to the afterlife, and since Davy Jones abandoned that duty, he was cursed and got all "tentacle-y", which isn't too bad as far as curses go, but you know. So I suppose if Will was a total jackass, he could decide to anchor the ship off the coast and let Elizabeth hang around while he devolved into a tentacled mess, but there are probably other implications to that situation, and c'mon, he just has to do the job, and she's mortal and belongs in the land of the living. As the pamphlet puts it, "Will's father is not alive - he and all the other crewmen on the Dutchman are in a state between the living and the dead. Elizabeth will not survive the journeys where the ship must travel - so she is not able to join the crew." Plus, I think it's pretty clear that the Dutchman is a total sausage-fest, and that's just the way some things are. On the issue of the undead crew, I think it's clear that in most cases, the crew cannot be killed, but there is the eel guy, who Barbossa decapitates, so I'm not sure what's up with that.
- How and when was Will resurrected? Oh my God, guys, this is so obvious. He stabbed the heart and Bootstrap Bill cut out Will's heart, literally saying "The Dutchman must have a captain," as he plunges the knife into Will's chest, and when the ship comes back up with Will at the helm, he has a big scar across his chest where they took out his heart as he became the new undead captain of the Flying Dutchman. Duh-doy! The pamphlet says, "The Dutchman must have a captain. Having stabbed the heart of Davy Jones, Will must assume his place as captain of the ship. Will is resurrected once the Dutchman crew cuts out his heart and after Davy Jones falls into the Maelstrom." So that's pretty much what I just said. I mean, come on you guys, it's not that difficult.
- Barbossa was Captain Jack's first mate, so how can he be a Pirate Lord? I'll admit that it's a little funky that both Jack and Barbossa, out of all the pirates across the world, happen to be two of the nine Pirate Lords, but they have to simplify these things where they can, and it's only a nitpick. I don't get where the confusion about how Barbossa can be a Pirate Lord come from though. No one ever said a first mate couldn't be a Pirate Lord (it seems unlikely, but then again, Jack was without a crew for a while there and still had the "Piece of Eight" that denotes his Pirate Lordship). As the pamphlet gives it, "At some time in the past, the Pirate Lord of the Caspian Sea passed his [or her, I'd like to note] Piece of Eight to Barbossa. That is a story yet to be told." Before ON STRANGER TIDES, one of the ideas for continuing the franchise was for spin-offs, which these answers seem to be suggesting.
- Did Tia Dalma bring Barbossa back from the dead because he was a Pirate Lord? Oh my god, guys, it's all there in the text of the movie. From the very start, they're going to get Jack back from Davy Jones Locker because he is one of the nine Pirate Lords and holds one of the nine Pieces of Eight, which he failed to pass onto a successor and is now with him in the Locker. Otherwise, Barbossa wouldn't have had a lot of incentive to go get the guy who killed him, and Barbossa is back because Tia Dalma resurrected him in exchange for his help in convening a Brethren Court to free her. The answer in the pamphlet says, "Yes. Tia Dalma/Calypso needed all the Pirate Lords to assemble the Brethren Court, so they could release her from her human bonds. Calypso resurrected Barbossa and tricked him [not really a 'trick', but under the false pretense that she'd help them against Davy Jones and the EIC when restored to her full powers] to retrieve Jack Sparrow from Davy Jones' Locker and summon a meeting of the Brethren.
- What's Calypso shouting when she's freed from her human bonds? People seem weirdly confused by Tia Dalma/Calypso, and I'll admit, the first time she showed up in DEAD MAN'S CHEST back in 2006, even I had a little trouble understanding her accent, but then people start asking why she grows huge when she's released (uh, because she's a goddess, duh), if she's supposed to be the woman Jones cut his heart out over (duh, they pretty much say it in the movie, in the conversation between Will, Jones and Beckett, that is if you hadn't already figured it out by then), and how she resurrected Barbossa (we already knew she was a voodoo witch lady, so that should be reason enough, but she's also a goddess with at least a fraction of her powers even in human form). But it doesn't freaking matter what she's shouting at the pirates after they free her, because the implication that she'll do nothing to help them is clear. The pamphlet's answer is, "She's yelling insults at the pirates in her native tongue." Duh-doy!
- How did Prison Dog escape Pelegostos Island? The people who asked this question probably couldn't figure out what all the peanut jokes were about either. It's called a non sequitur, and they say it straight out, "Sea turtles, mate." "He rode on the backs of sea turtles lashed together with his fur."
Gore Verbinski was mostly associated with horror, thanks to THE RING, but following POTC, his next two movies were the animated gonzo comedy-western/western homage RANGO and the heavily revisionist western THE LONE RANGER. It's not exactly subtle, but the spaghetti western influence throughout the Pirates of the Caribbean series, and AT WORLD'S END most of all, doesn't receive a lot of notice. It's basically a pirate version of Sergio Leone's 1968 epic western ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (another excellent movie and only about six minutes longer), but you swap out gunslingers for pirates and the railroad for the East India Trading Company, and Davy Jones is the Henry Fonda character. It's weird in the supplemental features and interviews that Verbinski compares the pirates to "rockers facing the onslaught of disco", because despite Verbinski's soft-spoken rock 'n' roll persona (he himself provided the very Ennio Morricone-style electric guitar solo of the movie's theme that plays at the start of the parlay sandbar scene), he's not fooling anyone who's been paying attention. It's a classic revisionist western theme, the story of heroes and villains from an era of frontiers and romance faced with fading away in a world of ruthless modernity. Although they're historically cut out to be on par with terrorists and notorious criminals by today's standards, it's actually fair to position them as symbols of freedom considering what stood for legitimately recognized governmental bodies and their laws at the time. Pirates in contrast lived the closest to a democratic and egalitarian lifestyle, and if some of them were sickos and sadists (like some of their non-democratically-selected but 'legitimate' governing official contemporaries were), it was in that which they were wrong and not necessarily in a career of piracy. It could be argued such, anyway. The East India Trading Company brings their brand of law, order and authority to the seas, civilization as it were, and it comes at a cost. The historical East India Trading Company was a powerful international symbol of colonial capitalism and oppression that, with its many ships full of valuable trade goods for dispersing between Asia and the far-flung reaches of the British Empire, were a natural target of pirates, but with their own military and immense governmental power, they protected their interests fiercely. Cutler Beckett is akin to the railroad baron who wields his power ruthlessly in order to shape the world however he sees fit, with a place for everything and a thing for every place. Davy Jones is the "black hat" cowboy in alliance with the railroad, helping to bring about a world that he has no place in, and Jack, Will, Elizabeth and Barbossa are "white hat" cowboys, or rather gray hats, standing against the assault.
Even if you don't like the movie itself, the soundtrack is sublime, full of rousing notes of adventure, romance, delight and tragedy, and I think, even as arguably personal my feelings about the movie are, that the score is undeniably one of the best ever. Hans Zimmer became much more well known thanks to his collaborations with Christopher Nolan, but far and away his best work has been on THE LION KING and this series. The film score for THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL, including the famous main theme of the series, "He's A Pirate", is officially credited to Klaus Badelt, a protege of Zimmer's who was suggested to compose the score after Zimmer was already committed to THE LAST SAMURAI. However, Zimmer is credited as a producer of the score, and claims a large degree of unofficial credit for the main themes introduced in the first film. "He's a Pirate" is one of the best and most popular original movie themes of the 21st century, picked up for use by pep bands and remixed as house music, although it bears noteworthy similarities to another Zimmer score - GLADIATOR. DEAD MAN'S CHEST introduced a new Jack Sparrow theme, which has a bit of a drunken swagger and freewheeling attitude that fits in the context of the movie, but the really good stuff in that movie is in the themes of Davy Jones and the Kraken. The Kraken's theme, exclusive to the second film, is aggressive and urgent, while Davy Jones's theme is similarly aggressive, but also deeply operatic and tragic, integrated to the film in incidental form as the tune Jones' plays on organ and in his and Calypso's matching music boxes. In particular, there's a small but strong moment early in AT WORLD'S END when a slowed organ version of the theme plays over Governor Swann, Mercer and others approaching the Flying Dutchman by boats through the flotsam left of an utterly destroyed pirate vessel, transitioning to Jones impotently playing the organ just before realizing a tear in the corner of his eye, indicating the closeness of the Dead Man's Chest and his heart, which he cut from his chest in order to never feel such pains again. It's a small moment in a really big movie, but it's also Jones's reintroduction for this sequel, and it's beautiful and cuts right to the point of his character in this adventure. There are two big new themes in AT WORLD'S END; the anthem "Hoist the Colours" and the lively, Celtic-style "Up is Down". With "Hoist the Colours", the idea was initially that each of the original trilogy films would open with a song; THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL had started with young Elizabeth Swann singing "Yo Ho (A Pirate's Life for Me)", but while DEAD MAN'S CHEST was in the editing process, the scene of Gibbs drunkenly singing "Dead Man's Chest" (the sea shanty invented by Robert Louis Stevenson for Treasure Island) had become the second scene after Will and Elizabeth's interrupted wedding. Regardless, AT WORLD'S END begins with the ultra-dark but quirky "suspended" sequence, in which a Royal Navy officer reads off a list of civil rights suspended by the East India Trading Company under martial law (each one punctuated by the dropping of numerous people from the gallows), until the mass of victims awaiting execution begin to sing "Hoist the Colours", led by a cabin boy not even tall enough to reach the noose without a barrel to stand upon. It's a song filled with none-too-subtle imagery for anyone paying attention, revealing many mysteries of the movie from the very start about how the first Brethren Court of pirates were helped by Davy Jones to imprison the sea goddess Calypso in human form ("The king and his men / Stole the queen from her bed / And bound her in her bones") in order to take control of the seas for mortal men ("The seas be ours and by the powers / Where we will we'll roam") . The chorus is a cry of freedom and unity for pirates ("Yo ho, haul together / Hoist the Colours high / Heave ho, thieves and beggars / Never shall we die"), and a second verse, sung more quietly by Elizabeth as she punts a boat along the waterways of Singapore to Sao Feng's bathhouse, is a call for the Brethren Court to unite again ("The bell has been raised / From its watery grave / Hear it's sepulchral tone? / A call to all / Pay heed the squall / And turn yourself toward home"). "Up is Down" is more prominently integrated to the overall score, but occurs in its pure form over an incredibly awesome (in the literal sense, it inspires awe) sequence where Jack Sparrow instigates an increasingly extreme rocking of the Black Pearl in an effort to capsize it in time to return to the land of the living. The music is lively and thrilling, driven by a Celtic-style fiddle, but also appears in slower, more sentimental renditions throughout the movie, primarily as a love theme.
THE SETS
Beautiful, lavish sets are a staple of any self-respecting period adventure movie, and it's a proud tradition of pirate movies in particular. I mean, if you're going to make a giant floating set, it might as well be awesome, and again, I do mean awesome both in the sense of inspiring awe and of being just freaking awesome. AT WORLD'S END goes above and beyond delivering in that department, not only featuring numerous gorgeously crafted pirate ships (the return of the Black Pearl and the Flying Dutchman, naturally, but also the Beckett's colossal flagship, the Endeavour, and Sao Feng's flagship, the Empress, among others), but also a beautifully elaborate fictional rendering of early 18th-century Singapore with bamboo walkways, bridges, waterways and more, as well as Sao Feng's steam-soaked bathhouse palace and its underground workings beneath. The Brethren Court's fortress "Shipwreck Cove" (which is on "Shipwreck Island" along with "the town of Shipwreck") is one of the stranger settings of this series, assembled out of dozens of broken ships stacked atop one another and resembling the sort of Christmas tree you might find inside a kitschy old seashore souvenirs shop, except really, really big. Shipwreck Cove is fine, but it ranks on the low end of this movie's production design for me, personally. All of the POTC movies have fantastic sets and props though (even the worst of the series, ON STRANGER TIDES, has at least a few really cool sets), and the physical spectacle is fantastic, but AT WORLD'S END has them all beat for a potent sense of tangibility and salty sea air that can be felt throughout. It's a heightened reality, but one that feels truly lived in and oozes with a real world flavor comparable to STAR WARS, and for all the CGI (which also top-notch, by the way), the practical aspects of the movie are never minimized. This movie is alleged to have cost $300 million, but it looks like $500 million, especially compared to the next movie. It has a look similar to that of high adventure movies from the '80s and early '90s, with the dust, smoke and glaring sun above decks, and an ever-present, salty ocean wetness, and the environments are so potent you can practically smell the wood of the ships and the smoke of the cannons. I don't even really know why, but I just have to point out the atmosphere and tangibility of scenes like Will tying the dead Navy sailors to barrels as a breadcrumb trail, and the shot of one being hoisted up out of the water, dripping as Tom Hollander smashes a glass bottle. Or the wonderful "up is down" sequences, in which characters run back and forth across the Black Pearl's full-size deck until the ship starts rocking, and they have to grab onto the railings to not fall to the other side and risk getting squashed by a cannon like one unfortunate soul. Even a scene like Elizabeth and Tia Dalma on the front of the ship sailing out of a battle-razed Singapore, where surrounding water and background are clearly digital (not for insufficient rendering, but more for the physical impossibility of the shot), I can't help but think, holy crap, look at that ship.
THE ACTION
It's undeniably aged well in an era overwhelmed by often monotonous superhero fistfights and property destruction, but there's something special either way about this kind of swashbuckling pirate action, with the battling ships, swordfights and fish-people. There's just not much else like it. I mean, not every summer blockbuster action scene is going to be as dull and uninspired as Superman and General Zod reducing CGI cities to rubble in a fistfight too fast to tell what's going on, but even the good superhero fights are still mostly super-strong people slugging it out, even when they find a few fresh innovations to throw in there. How often do you get a couple of sailing ships firing big balls of iron at each other to rip their beams to splinters while people swing on ropes between said ships with their sticks of steels and flintlock pistols in a rousing pirate battle, though? And regardless of the classic status of other swashbuckling movies which have really fun action scenes of their own and are products of their time, I'm sorry, but AT WORLD'S END has them all beat. Obviously there's the big one, the biggest possible action finale to this trilogy imaginable, and even after they imagined it, they really ought to have decided it wasn't feasible and tried something else; two great big pirate ships riding the currents of an epic-sized whirlpool in a storm, blasting each other with cannons and swinging between decks to battle with swords and pistols, and throwing a goddamn wedding in there for good measure. It's insane in all the best ways, and how they did it is just as crazy. I suppose you could take a couple of top deck sets for where the actors are going to be, and fill the rest in with digital effects, but if you're insane and your last movie made a billion dollars, you could build two full-sized pirate ships on top of motors (to tilt them at various angles) inside of a great big out-of-use air hangar, and film the actors under a torrential shower of near-freezing water (anything warmer would risk fostering poisonous bacteria growth), with all the stunts entailed, and then fill in the rest with digital effects. Some filmmakers have a "do what you can on-set" approach to special effects, but with these movies, Gore Verbinski took that a little further with a "do what you can on-set, even if you really shouldn't" approach, and it's spectacular in a dozen ways. So, obviously, the maelstrom battle is astonishing, magnificent, spectacular, and hey, one of the best damn action sequences in any movie ever, and I realize that it sounds like I'm throwing around a lot of hyperbole about this movie, but I don't know what else to say. It's how I feel, and the movie's been around for 10 years, so I've had a while to live with it. It's really a bunch of sequences inside of a mega-sequence, and by God, it even has a swordfight on top of a ship's yardarm. Inside of a giant whirlpool. I guess you could complain that it's tough to believe that they're able to keep their balance up there like Peter Pan and Captain Hook did in an animated movie, but one of the combatants is a squidman who can teleport and move through solid objects. It's one of the many things that I love about these movies, that they take these outlandish, cartoonish concepts that you may have imagined playing with toys in the bathtub as a kid, such as a colossal squid tearing the hell out of a ship or two pirates fighting with swords on top of a yardarm, and they put them onscreen with top-of-the-line production values. Plus, these movies are weird, and none are weirder than AT WORLD'S END, where one of the biggest, craziest action set-pieces involves characters running back and forth across the Black Pearl's deck until it rocks so far that it capsizes, which is an incredible image with the lively tune of "Up is Down", and concludes when the upside-down ship inexplicably floats into another horizon, gushing all the water from its holes. Early into the movie, once we've gotten a full look at that intricate Singapore set, the Black Pearl crew and Sao Feng's crew realize they've been infiltrated by East India Trading Company spies, and the whole thing explodes into a thrilling, violent, briefly horrific and entirely spectacular action scene with highlight moments for several characters, leaving the Singapore set in fiery ruins and that's the last we see of it. And it was huge and beautiful, and the economics of this are insane, but it makes such a good mic drop. There is hardly a moment that this movie doesn't have its weird and magnificent metaphorical dick out on the metaphorical table, and then it blows up the table. Beautiful.
Elizabeth Swann's trajectory in this trilogy is the opposite of Princess Leia's in the original Star Wars trilogy. Leia in the first movie is powerful, regal, clever and an adept leader, followed by THE EMPIRE STRIKE BACK, in which she's an aggravated and barely competent battle-axe, and then by RETURN OF THE JEDI, she's barely along for the ride mostly to strangle a giant frog-slug while wearing a metal bikini. Princess Leia started out so great, and the sequels totally squandered her in favor of more Han (to be fair, Carrie Fisher was on a lot of drugs for a while there). Elizabeth Swann, played by Star Wars alumni Keira Knightley (she played Queen Amidala's main handmaiden/decoy in THE PHANTOM MENACE), is a solid character throughout the movies, but she has a striking evolution, beginning in THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL as a feisty and quick-thinking society lady who hates corsets but is still stuck in something of a "damsel in distress" situation, at least for the first half of the movie. She's a modern, feminism-friendly version of the usual leading lady in a swashbuckling boy's adventure movie. DEAD MAN'S CHEST is fascinating and really weird, because the main thing about Elizabeth in that movie is that she is horny. It's a less typical direction to go with a leading lady in a major summer blockbuster film franchise. It's sort of a love triangle, but not really, because she clearly loves and chooses Will, but there's something about that weird-ass, dreadlocked pirate man that she needs to get out of her system, and she's been spending the last year practicing swordplay with Will, and all she really wants to do is play with Will's sword, and she really thought that she'd be married by then! She's so ready to be married! It's definitely different from the female leads of other blockbuster-sized movies who are usually divided into the "virgin" and the "vamp", characters who are defined by their sexuality or lack thereof. By the end of that movie though, she kisses Jack and kills him, and that seems to do the trick.
In AT WORLD'S END, Elizabeth is awesome and the key to the movie. There are truly three leads here between Jack, Elizabeth and Will, but Elizabeth is the leadiest of the leads. After the "Suspended" prologue and opening title card, she's the first of our main characters we see, punting a boat along the foggy waterways of Singapore, and she's changed since we last saw her. As she says, "I have had more than enough experience dealing with pirates," and she can hold her own as she and Barbossa arrive at Sao Feng's bathhouse. When Sao Feng's captain of the guard, Tai Huang, insists they remove all their weapons before meeting with the Pirate Lord of the South China Sea, she unpacks a virtual arsenal of pistols, blades, grenades, and with some difficulty, she withdraws a very large firearm from somewhere on her lower person out of frame. There are a couple of orifices that it seems she might be taking the gun from, but neither of them are realistic or practical, and in any case, Geoffrey Rush's reactions are priceless. She's gone full hardcore though, and when Will makes a bonehead move that lands them in the clutches of the East India Trading Company, she agrees to resolve the situation by being traded over to Sao Feng, despite his clearly rapey intentions, because hey, seriously, she can handle herself. When Sao Feng tries to force himself on her and takes a giant splinter to the vital organs and out the other end, his last act is to make her his heir as captain of the Empress and Pirate Lord of the South China Sea, and despite her understandable shock, she takes it in stride, acting as captain in surrendering to the Flying Dutchman. When she arrives at Shipwreck Cove as one of the nine Pirate Lords, she's unexpectedly elected to the somewhat cartoony title of 'Pirate King', when Jack cunningly tosses her a sympathetic vote, knowing she will order the confederation of pirates to war against the East India Trading Company. The historical pirate Henry Avery was nicknamed "King of Pirates" and there's a Pirate King in the Gilbert & Sullivan opera The Pirates of Penzance, but when Barbossa counters Jack's argument for war that, "An act of war, and this be exactly that, can only be declared by the Pirate King," it sounds ridiculous.
"You made that up!" Jack returns. But he didn't. I mean, hell, this is a movie with recurring non-sequiturs about peanuts, so I guess it works, and anyway, it's awesome. I love that it doesn't even have to be Pirate King or Pirate Queen. Guy or gal, it's a Pirate King, and Elizabeth Swann is the goddamn Pirate King! Hell yeah! She also has a vengeance storyline going on in this movie, because her father's death is ordered by Lord Beckett, and she has personal stakes in this fight. For a lot of the other pirates, it's less personal, so she gets to give the big "Today is our Independence Day"-style rallying speech, and it's a doozy. Can you hear the music rising as she climbs atop the Black Pearl's railing with a storm rolling in behind her?
"You will listen to me! Listen! The other ships will be looking to us, the 'Black Pearl', to lead, and what will they see? Frightened bilge rats aboard a derelict ship? No. No, they will see free men and freedom! And what the enemy will see, they will see the flash of our cannons, and they will hear the ringing of our swords, and they will know what we can do! By the sweat of our brow and the strength of our backs and the courage of our hearts -- Gentlemen, hoist the colors."
Whoo, chills every time. Keira Knightley has never been a poor actress, but she's come a long way and it may be easy to make fun of because they're really putting it out there in a goofy, over-the-top pirate movie, but hey, she sells it. She begins this series as a young girl of posh living standards who imagines "it would be rather exciting to be a pirate", but once all is said and done, she's the bloody king of them.
In a way it's like the Twilight movies, which follow the romance of an uncharismatic and pale young woman with an only barely more charismatic and more pale vampire guy over their surprisingly uneventful ups and downs until the penultimate movie where they finally have the wedding of the century and takes about an hour, because damn it all if the filmmakers aren't going to milk every last bit of fangasm out of the fans. There's a lot more going on, but this wedding is one of the major payoffs to the series that this movie brings, and it's cheesy and it's fan service, except it's also incredibly awesome and I can't stand how much I love it. When the trailer came out, it was funny because Will proposes to Elizabeth in the middle of a battle, and she incredulously responds, "I don't think now is the best time." Like, yeah, William; you can't get married in the middle of a battle! But then you see the movie, and it's like, hell yeah, they're getting married in the middle of the one of the biggest, most spectacular action set-pieces in movie history because all's fair in both love and war. Barbossa, the guy who technically provided the impetus to bring them together and gave Will the confidence to reveal his feelings to her by starting all that conflict as the villain in the first movie, officiates over the ceremony, multitasking in the middle of kicking all kinds of ass.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we be gathered here today -- to nail your gizzard to the mast, you poxy cur!" The music is beautiful, they're on a soaking ship in the middle of a massive whirlpool, people are trying to kill them, while the official, the bride and the groom are killing soldiers and fish-men left and right. It's funny, romantic and exciting, and culminates in a sweeping, rotating shot of Will and Elizabeth locking lips while all hell is breaking loose around them, while Pintel, Ragetti and the monkey observe adoringly from below decks. What more could you possibly want? And then it makes it hit so much harder when they have the gall to kill Will.
You're riding high; Elizabeth swings over to the Flying Dutchman, because she's the goddamn Pirate King, alright, and comes face to face with Davy Jones himself.
"Harridan! You'll see no mercy from me!" he scowls.
"That's why I brought this!" she returns and whips the sword off her belt and dives right into the fray. It's all three of our main heroes; Jack, Will and Elizabeth; in desperate combat against Davy Jones to get the key and the Dead Man's Chest so that Jack can stab the heart, thus defeating Jones and allowing Jack to claim the Dutchman and immortality. It's not particularly quick or simple; Jones, in an act of cruelty rather than strategy, plunges the sword William Turner into Will's chest, further twisting it into him as Elizabeth and Jack look on in shock. It is such a "holy shit" moment, one that should have been expected in retrospect, with Tia Dalma's "You have a touch of destiny about you, William Turner," remarks and "For what we want most, there is a cost must be paid," plus the wedding and the question of who to kill Jones and inherit the Dutchman and his duty to ferry souls, but this is the climactic chapter to a swashbuckling adventure-comedy-fantasy franchise, and they just brutally killed the main hero! Norrington got a pretty good finish, sacrificing himself to help Elizabeth and her crew to escape the Flying Dutchman's brig and getting bloodily skewered by Bootstrap Bill (the father of his romantic rival), but he was the noble-ish character that would have been utterly vanilla in any other series (but this series is weird and even gives him a full story) and frankly, you sort of expect that kind of character to snuff it. But Will? Of course, it isn't quite as bad as all that, because Jack's shock brings back that honest streak with a vengeance, and as Will draws his last breath, Jack helps him to stab the heart, taking away Jack's shot at eternal life and allowing Will a chance to live, even in a half form of life. Then that horror angle of the series comes back as the monstrous crew of the Flying Dutchman emerges from the woodwork, chanting and surrounding Will's body as Jack pulls Elizabeth away from her husband and Bootstrap plunges a knife into Will's chest. Will returns, now with a jagged scar across his chest and bound to the Dutchman, and between the Dutchman and the Pearl, they lay in so much cannonfire into Beckett's ship from both sides that it's reduced to splinters and Beckett resigns himself to death. But it's a bittersweet ending, because Will can only return to land once every ten years to be with Elizabeth, and she cannot join him in the world beyond as he ferries souls lost at sea.
I was in my young teens when this movie opened in theaters, and if I'm being perfectly honest, it was a time of numerous learning experiences, many of them experience which I didn't really grasp the lesson of much later. It's not like I was on substances or involved with, well, habitual criminal behavior, mind you, but maybe I was a little to opinion with everyone, so when Jeff Vice, the late movie critic of the Deseret News wrote a piece about AT WORLD'S END that didn't line up with my intensely enthusiastic perspective, I let him know. Like an idiot, I let him know. Actually, it wasn't a very harsh review. He gave it a 2.5 out of 4 stars, which is technically still positive, and when the headline read "Aarghh! 'Pirates' Way Too Long", well, that's entirely fair. Having it as it is now and being able to watch it from the flexible format of home viewing, I can't imagine what I'd want removed from it, but they should have aimed for a more reasonable runtime while putting it together for practicality's sake. But when you're young and paying attention to movie reviews, you may pick a favorite critic or two (Roger Ebert, usually, because he was on TV and had approachable tastes), but Jeff Vice happened to be the critic in the newspaper that my family subscribed to at the time, and while I agreed with him on the movies I saw more often than not, he was usually a critic that I balked at. He's given a 3.5 out of 4 to DEAD MAN'S CHEST, but then backtracked after seeing it again, which makes sense, but I still thought he was dumb for changing his mind (these days, I'd give DEAD MAN'S CHEST a 3 out of 4, myself). But I liked AT WORLD'S END a lot more than DEAD MAN'S CHEST, and then he wrote an article about how his less enthusiastic opinion of AT WORLD'S END had proven to be unusually popular with readers he'd hear from, and that was the prompt I need to let him hear from me. I e-mailed him, and while I don't remember the exact words I used, I know it was less of an argument and more of a barrage of insults like "stupid", and "idiot", and "moron". Nothing too creative I think. To my surprise, he mailed me back, and again, I don't remember the exact words, but basically, he pointed out to me that I what I'd said wasn't an argument and that insulting him did nothing to prove my point. Surprised but still insistent that my point (which I hadn't actually made) be heard, I e-mailed him back and apologized as perfunctorily as possible (and beaming with my newfound "maturity") so I could argue this time. He said that the movie was overstuffed (true, sure) and that it cynically was setting the stage for more movies (not exactly true). He talked about how it was setting up Jack to look for the Fountain of Youth (although that is where they ended up taking the sequel, I'd argue that it was a perfectly reasonable note for Jack's story to end up, with or without the sequel, and as it turned out, without the sequel would have been better) and left the question of what would happen with Will and Elizabeth (of course, now DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES is continuing that story, but if they'd left it with AT WORLD'S END, it would have been suitably resolved anyway). After I'd e-mailed him a few times, he, perhaps correctly, stopped responding, because I was a overtly individualistic 15-year-old who would have kept going until I'd had decisive victory, even though that's how none of this works. I'd still argue that the movie is a 4 out of 4 and one of the best summer blockbuster movies ever, but it would have been nice to have an actual conversation about it though.
The thing about this series that makes it really special is that it is really special. I don't mean that in some namby-pamby, trite "you are special" way. They're wholly unique within the blockbuster landscape. There are plenty of superhero movies with their high-powered slug-fests and explosive mayhem (WONDER WOMAN, SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING), space adventures with their laser gunfights and explosive mayhem (GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2, ALIEN: COVENANT, VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS), high-concept sci-fi/fantasy actioners with their big monsters, big robots and explosive mayhem (TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT, THE MUMMY), Earth-bound action-thrillers with their fast-paced martial arts, gunfights, car chases and explosive mayhem (BABY DRIVER, ATOMIC BLONDE), hard-R THE HANGOVER-style comedies with their gross-out gags and less frequent but still sometimes occasional explosive mayhem (SNATCHED, THE HOUSE, ROUGH NIGHT), and high-profile family animated comedy-adventures (CARS 3, DESPICABLE ME 3). Pretty much every summer blockbuster of recent years has come in one of those categories, and some of them are really great while some of them are crass commercial bullshit (looking at you, Illumination Entertainment), but even when they do their thing in a refreshingly innovative way, they mostly still tick off certain boxes like fistfights, car chases, CGI destruction, explosive mayhem and f***ing Minions, and there's a lot of overlap. Except in pirate movies, and the only studio making pirate movies is Disney, and the only pirate movies Disney makes are Pirates of the Caribbean movies, so as far as I'm concerned, they can keep making them. Every time some jerk says, "Ugh, they made another pirate movie," I think 'Ugh, they made another person like you?' Besides, 3 out of 4 Pirates of the Caribbean movies are good so far, and two of them are great, so that's a pretty good average. The one bad one is pretty bad, but even that still has swordfights, cool costumes and sets, and you know, goddamn pirates doing sort of pirate-y things. Swords, flintlock pistols, old-timey costumes, luxurious sets, mythic monsters, exotic locations and more, things that you just can't get from any other movies they make these days. This one has a hundreds-of-feet-tall woman standing in the middle of a ship and exploding in thousands of crabs. You can't get that anywhere else.
THE TEN BEST STUFF ABOUT PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END
10. NEGOTIATIONS - The split scene of Jack dealing with Beckett to double-cross the Brethren Court while Barbossa, Elizabeth and Will persuade Sao Feng to join forces with them against the East India Trading Company, intercutting rapidly between the witty exchanges before developing into an action scene with Jack strolling his way off the Endeavor while cannonfire blasts through around him. So much fun.
9. WEIRDNESS - This movie is weird as balls, and I love it for that. Peanut jokes - there completely and utterly random. Multiple Jacks? Pretty good, but especially the bit with Jack talking to the two little Jacks hiding in his dreadlocks. Weird sea creature Jack licking his own brain - brilliant. Jack breathing in Will's face to throw him off the ship? Amazing. Guy trying to warm his frozen foot and accidentally breaking off his big toe - just perfect. For goodness sakes, they literally sail right over the edge of the Earth, and it's awesome.
8. SINGAPORE - You get a bunch of great re-introductions of characters already in the middle of their latest adventure (I love that in a sequel), a gorgeous set, and a big, rousing action set-piece to kick the movie off.
7. ENDING - The ending to this movie is so perfectly fantastic, with Jack's ship once again gone, stolen by Barbossa, but with Jack getting the navigational charts and the way to the Fountain of Youth. Quirky as ever, he sails away in the dingy that Barbossa snidely left for him, flies his own flag and sets sail for immortality, but first, as his compass shows him, what he really wants first is rum. Taken with the fourth movie, this final scene is undercut a bit, but taken on its own, it's simply perfect. On a weird meta note, it could be taken that he is en route to Florida (the traditional location of the Fountain of Youth as marked on the charts), and it is at Disney World in Florida that Jack Sparrow is immortalized in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.
6. ELIZABETH - Just the character in general, where this story takes her and what it builds her into.
5. BEACH SEX - Call me a sap, but the scene of Will and Elizabeth's farewell on the beach almost always gets me. I think it would be kind of funny (if a little too obvious, not to mention tonally inappropriate) to zoom in on the Chest while they were canoodling off-screen, and the beating sound would get louder and faster. But, I mean, you've got that beautiful 'magic hour' sunset lighting, the playfulness of the boot and the sexiness of Will caressing her leg, and the bittersweet departure with selling music as Elizabeth is left standing on the beach with a weather eye on the horizon.
4. "UP IS DOWN" - The scene where the characters have to run back and forth across the Black Pearl's deck to make it rock and flip over in order to return to the land of the living is so novel and big, centered around an astonishing and very tactile visual of this massive tilting vessel that people are trying to stay ahead of, and the music is really catchy.
2. THE WEDDING - I love that wedding scene. I love that it's a wedding in the middle of a huge climactic battle, and that it's violent, and funny and corny. I love the rhythm of it. "Will Turner, do you take me..." and there's a little flourish of the score as they switch positions while holding hands, "...to be your wife," another flourish, "...in sickness and in health," pausing to both stab a guy, "with health being the less likely." Holy crap, folks, it's perfect.
 |
| Images via Disney |
No comments:
Post a Comment