By Ryland Walker Knight
Given all that surrounds the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, it is hard to believe these movies could be smart films, let alone films this smart. Not only that, the films are hard to believe, period. One's natural impulse is to resist. And there's a lot to resist. They're bloody pirate movies, for one. For another, it's a bloody fantastical pirate movie franchise inspired by a theme park ride and brought to light by Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer. In the third film, At World's End, there is a lot of exposition in the scenes driven by dialogue-as-interrogation and it barrels at the viewer without pause, leading many to think the film is incomprehensible, and dismissible. At first, I resisted, too.
The primary problem that dooms the Pirates sequels in the eyes of most critics is one rooted in their release dates and their commercial genre designation, not their status as pirate genre movies, or their status simply as movies — that is, movies to be read. A similar fate befell both Dead Man’s Chest and Michael Mann’s Miami Vice last summer. What I found in revisiting the films was that they were not uniquely summer blockbusters, but that they were films, plain and simple. Outside the seasonal anticipation brought on by marketing bombardments, I loosened my resistance and let the films show me their logic, and I allowed myself to feel the thrill of their bombastic blockbuster thunder, as well as their hard-lined visual and generic play. This is not to say I whole-heartedly disliked either film initially, nor was I plain dumbfounded. I simply could not properly articulate my resistance. First, I ignored it. But then, curious as I am, I sought and found their logic. And, at last, I had fun.
At a very basic level, like Irvin Kirshner's The Empire Strikes Back and James Cameron's Aliens, Gore Verbinski's two Pirates sequels disrupt everything (the worlds, the narratives, the structures) the first film (in each trilogy) rightly set up at the outset. The Caribbean world of Verbinski's trilogy is, after the first film, one of constant shuffling, of tangential narrative ruptures: the world of the film, like the world we audience members live in, is chaotic. Of course, this Caribbean world is not the world we live in. In our world, there are no giant mythological squids or sea goddesses, but there are, however, pirates — and daily acts of piracy. And there are social dictums, social pacts, that we appropriate and reconstitute on an individual basis, to live with ourselves, to live with the world. The main thrust of this trilogy is that reckoning: How will we live in the world when our autonomous freedom is continually challenged?
At the end of the first film, the world was set right and the answer seemed clear: Jonathan Pryce's Governor Weatherby Swann says, at the close, "Perhaps on the rare occasion pursuing the right course demands an act of piracy -- piracy itself can be the right course?" The sequels only complicate this claim(-as-question). Piracy, in the whole of the trilogy, becomes synonymous with freedom. Except, it is a freedom bound to the sea. There remains a bondage. Piracy is by rights unlawful, yet it may in fact be a more righteous life in these films' mythology. It is a life of freedom, of free will to voyage across a limitless plane, but it is a life kept in check by specific mythic codes that the plane of the sea and her goddess Calypso will allow. There are rules, or laws, but they are more like myths — "more like guidelines," as we are told in the first film (but even this lax “guidelines” stance is called into check in the sequels when the manifest Codex tome is brought to bear late in At World’s End). The primary disruption of the remainder of the trilogy is the manifest exhibition and explanation of those codes and myths that govern a pirate's life, that is, a life at sea.
The sea appears a utopia here, a setting that affords its passengers seemingly limitless boundaries: the horizon stretches ever onward. Yet, this utopia is one not even a pirate can claim dominion over. It is a plane to be sailed across, not penetrated or bent to one's will. This is Davy Jones' failure. Davy Jones (Bill Nighy's eyes, somehow, register emotions poignant and furious under the weight of facial CGI prosthetics) attempted to reject his bondage, his duty, to the sea (to ferry the dead to the beyond) and was subsequently mutated into a tentacle-faced monster who claimed, falsely and delusionally, in Dead Man's Chest, "I am the sea." He not only claims dominion over the sea, he fully claims the sea as his, and as him. By carving out his heart and binding himself to his boat, he has bound himself to the sea, not claimed it.
In At World's End, this bondage and this excavation's origin is revealed. Jones was in love with the sea goddess Calypso and agreed to his ferrying duty to maintain his love of her, and his love of the sea, forever. This eternal love, however, cost him more than his heart could bear. When he arrived at their planned reunion after ten years of upholding his post, primed for his lover, she was not there, in human form, to share the day. So he rejected his heart and his post, and turned cruel. In rejecting his heart, he presumed he would assume control over that which his heart was tied to: the sea. Yet, after confronting Calypso in The Black Pearl's brig (in the middle section of At World's End), he admits, "My heart will always belong to you." For, as she says, "Would you love me if I were anything but as I am?" Calypso is the sea as Davy Jones is tied to the sea. In the climactic battle he snarls, "My freedom was sealed long ago." He rejected not just his heart, he rejected the pirate inside and the pirate life lived outside, in the world, on the sea: a life intended to be led and sailed through all time, forever, past the ocean's end to the ethereal, utopian beyond.
At World's End's title lets us know that this oceanic utopia is finite, or, perhaps, that the precipice is a navigable space. The "end" of the title references not just the end of the world (the ocean, the utopia), but also the end of life and the end of the trilogy. And in the world of Pirates of the Caribbean, all three of these elements are ably transgressed, within the reason of the code. Davy Jones failed the code. At World's End shows how one might perform this able transgression, and live on. Firstly, the premise of this third film's first act is a means to up-end the death of Johnny Depp's iconic Captain Jack Sparrow. Captain Barbossa (the ever growling and charming Geoffrey Rush), who appeared dead at the end of the first film only to be revived at the close of the second film, leads Will Turner (ever-fey Orlando Bloom) and Elisabeth Swann (ever-fierce Keira Knightley) into Davy Jones' Locker -- that is, a land of the dead -- to rescue the lost Captain Jack and return him to the sea -- that is, the land of the living.
Death is surmountable here, given the proper smarts and will and courage to play with and by the code. The final movement from the Locker back to the sea is a literal inversion of the world's end, that plane of the sea. The Black Pearl appears lost, possibly adrift forever in the Locker, until Witty Jack solves their existential riddle in the land of the dead: "Up is down." He must flip the boat, turn the plane of the Locker's sky into the plane of the Caribbean's sea: he must up-end the world. The sunset, from the proper perspective, that is from underneath, is a sunrise. After flipping the boat into the water, with the upside down and the downside up, the sea rushes past the deck, equalizing the space again — righting the world's end, the sea's plane, and exposing the Locker's sunset as the Caribbean's sunrise. Like Jack's newfound lease on life, the day is beginning anew, on the sea.
By the close of At Worlds End, each of these primary heroic characters has once more begun anew and claimed his or her freedom of choice as a pirate, as one bound to the code of the sea. For our no-way lovers Will and Elisabeth this is the rudest denial: they live on, as does their love, yet their union is denied save for a single-day re-union anniversary every ten years. We are led to believe they will succeed where Davy Jones and his mistress Calypso failed because Will honors his promises and his debts alike — and he accepts his bondage to this code, to his place as a pirate, and as a captain of a pirate vessel bound, first and foremost, to the sea and to the beyond. He will not neglect his duty. In honoring this duty, he will honor his love of, for, and with Elisabeth. His freedom — like his love, his piracy and his utopia — is complicated, and bounded, despite its apparent endless horizons. For Captain Jack, this is a similar conundrum: he is free to sail the seas at his leisure again, yet his boat, The Black Pearl, is gone, stolen once more by Captain Barbossa, as it was in the beginning of the series. And so, Jack, too, ends this trilogy as he began it: in a dinghy. Yet he is ruled by none other than himself and the sea.
I know what you're thinking. Really, I do. It’s a summer movie. A summer movie should be fun and easy to grasp. And here I have to agree. But it’s more complicated than that. For one, we are dealing with sequels. In that I have claimed the second and third Pirates films as good sequels, I should also like to claim that any good sequel disrupts and up-ends its predecessor, as well as its preceding film’s logic. It is for this reason the Pirates sequels are so routinely railed against: they sure-handedly undo the first film’s utopian logic. They complicate that film’s utopia just as the trilogy, on the whole, complicates the utopia of the sea, and one’s freedom upon it, and within the world.
The first film, The Curse of The Black Pearl, had a complicated story in its own right, but its structure was sound and its ending was a tidy, fun resolution. The sequels are anything but tidy, as many critics have pointed out. What these critics miss is how the sequels re-appropriate the first film’s signature tropes to re-cast and re-write the trilogy’s narrative, and the pirate genre in general. From the start of the second film, the resolution of the first is put in check: the marriage that seemed so imminent at the close of The Curse of the Black Pearl is literally arrested and barred from happening in Dead Man’s Chest’s opening sequence. At the start of At World’s End, Dead Man's Chest's thrilling dénouement revelation of the revived Barbossa is flipped into a hanging sequence: pirates are being sent to death, not brought back from the dead. Then, to actually pick up the thread of rescuing Captain Jack from Davy Jones’ Locker, the crew has to surrender themselves and their lives to the great plunge into death, over the world’s end.
During the climax of At World's End, the sea opens into a seemingly bottomless (endless) vortex created by Calypso. The Flying Dutchman and The Black Pearl proceed to enter the swirl, to battle to the death. Aboard The Dutchman, a timid East India Trading Company stooge alerts Davy Jones to this danger. Jones, all raged excitement, grabs the wheel from the stooge and spews, "What? Afraid to get wet?" To really watch these films for what they are, one has to risk getting wet. That is, diving in and playing with the images — submitting to the fun. And this should be fun. It’s a bloody pirate movie.
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House Next Door contributor Ryland Walker Knight is the infrequent publisher of the blog Vinyl Is Heavy.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Afraid to get wet? Plunging into and flipping At World's End.
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27 comments:
Having just read through this article once, I can sumise that it's head and shoulders above any and all "criticisms" I have read about the film thus far. It seems that every negative review I've read claimed that the film is "too long and too plot-heavy," while positive ones merely cite its great effectsa and sensational action sequences. This piece instead moves beyond the topical details of the overwhelming mindlessness of much of journalistic criticism.
Interestingly, I share many of your sentiments about the movie and I almost fell victim to the growing amount of negativity expressed toward the film. I have been thinking about the movie for the past two days, since I've seen it, attempting to process my increasingly positive reflections about it and I found this piece to be exactly what I needed to read.
Your refusal to simply dismiss these films (as well as Miami Vice) based on their being "summer blockbusters" opens up a world of critical possibilities, and you have done an excellent job of exploring them. I will most definitely be citing this piece in my forthcoming review of the film.
But, for now, I'll just say that articles like this enable viewers to engage cinema on a critical level, whereas most journalistic criticism is guilty of the same claims they makes of "summer blockbusters" being products and consumer property.
I hope to engage this critical perspective about the movie and contrbiute to a far more important dialogue regarding its existence (in your words) as a film.
Well, Ryland -- I read through this piece the first time with a raised eyebrow (and I'm a guy who actually has some good things to say about the "Star Wars" prequels!). By the end, the eyebrow wasn't completely at rest, but it wasn't doing that Mr. Spock thing anymore. Am I going to have to go see this movie now, dammit?
I'm still resisting. I saw the first movie in the theater and thought it was pretty good for what it was; the script was structurally quite intricate and satisfying for a summer blockbuster (it reminded me something Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale might have come up with in the 80s -- lots of setups and payoffs). And I was as delighted by Depp's elaborate curlicue performance as everyone else was. But it was too goddamn long, too bludgeoning in its sound design and editing style, and Verbinski lacked a poet's eye, which I think is absolutely necessary for a swashbuckling sea adventure. I couldn't get through the second movie, for some of the reasons you cite positively in your piece -- I felt like they were arbitrarily messing with a fairly solid construct, merely for the sake of not being accused of repeating themselves. The "Matrix" sequels did this, and while there were interesting ideas in both of them, they should have been combined into one tight movie, or else the original should have been permitted to stand on its own. I had the same gut feeling about the "Pirates" sequels. You've leavened my certainty with doubt. If I take my nine-year old to see this, will I exit the theater grumbling? And will she?
Ted: sweet.
Well, Matt, here's something I probably shouldn't admit: my ten-year old sister thought the movie was "weird". She immediately got a lot of the "twists" before they revealed themselves later in the film but she thought it was "weird" that "they totally changed it from the first movies." I tried to talk with her about how, maybe later, after thinking about it, she might like it more. She said she would try. She still likes Johnny Depp a lot, after all.
As for Verbinski's eye...I think he's got a really good one. I will concede there is a bit too much coverage -- and that the films are a tad long -- but some of the visual metaphors, especially here in At World's End, are jaw dropping in their simple beauty and effectiveness. For one: flipping the boat. That sequence alone is worth seeing this on a big screen. That and the swirling climax. The spectacle of these films is pretty frickin great. And Bill Nighy's Davy Jones is the sweetness.
I thought it was odd that Lord Beckett didn't know that the Flying Dutchman got taken during the maelstorm sea battle with the Black Pearl. I guess he tuned out of the movie for a few minutes. Probably wondering what the hell the Calypso - Davy Jones sub-plot had to do with anything.
LOUDEST MOVIE EVER!
What I found in revisiting the films was that they were not uniquely summer blockbusters, but that they were films, plain and simple.
Matt just used this lazy, silly trope last week - c'mon, guys:
'The important thing to remember about this piece of art is not that it's art as such, not that it signifies, not that its structure does or does not reinforce and flow from its meaning (and vice versa), and certainly not that it's meant to be experienced by "readers" or "viewers"...but rather that it exists in a medium - excitingly, in its very own medium!'
Yes, we get it: phrases like 'narrative ruptures' carry weight among people who took any criticial-theory classes since the 70's, 'generic play' is a handy 'critical' excuse for soulless schematicism, and unnecessary hyphens in words like 're-appropriate ... re-cast and re-write' serve as evidence that this isn't just a review, but a review consisting of words - in a specific order, at that!
This rush of wings would be worthwhile if we were talking about the Matrix sequels, maybe - films that get smarter and more complex as they go along, even as their ambitions make them silly and sluggish. But PotC:AWE is a film in which most of the plot machinations for two hours lead to the assembly of a flotilla of pirate ships, which then...sits there...while the principals make thunderously inappropriate speeches and get on with the swordfighting. It's a film that takes Johnny Depp's marvelous deviant pirate and neuters him ('pirate lord?' Are you fucking joking?). It's a film that takes the multilayered Norrington (who ends that first flick so well, letting Elizabeth and Will go) and makes him into one more quickly-forgotten chesspiece with an almost parenthetical death scene.
It is also, we might note, a film that delivers maybe the most unearned-but-brilliant romantic climax I've seen in ages, the onboard 'wedding' of Orlando and Keira. Bill Nighy is a superb villain/tragic hero. And the post-credits sting is lovely in its way. But there's nothing going on in this film, Ryland, and namechecking the turgid, risible Miami Vice doesn't change that. It's like Gladiator (or the aforementioned Vice - a loud, uneven, aggressively ridiculous film whose makers evidently think 'epic' (oh that poor devalued word) is synonymous with 'they'll sit still for this.'
At World's End is the first disappointing PotC film, I'm sorry to say; the second was buffoonish and ended badly, but it mostly didn't pretend to be anything but a summer comedy. The first scene of PotC: AWE gave me such hope that its world would matter. But it doesn't; 'piracy' is meaningless shorthand for the filmmakers at this point, and we're asked to believe that the monsters who butcher an entire town a half-hour into Curse of the Black Pearl are freedom-fighters for the last few reels of World's End. Schematicize all you want, but that's the bottom line of all the sympathy-bargaining and double-crossing in these puffed-up, tiresome sequels.
Jack the swishy subversive turns into Jerry Lewis, and Keira Knightley gives a truly stupefying speech straight out of Independence Day. Cut to 30-minute CGI showcase, complete with giant-token-hoodoo-woman-turns-into-crabs-turns-into-big-wet-hole digital-effects Oscar clip/regressive semiotic parade.
I know what you're thinking. Really, I do. It’s a summer movie. A summer movie should be fun and easy to grasp. And here I have to agree. But it’s more complicated than that.
Weird self-contradictory syntax aside, Ryland, no. I'm not thinking that 'a summer movie should be fun and easy to grasp.' I was wondering, rather, why more critics aren't content to admit, 'I have nothing to add to the experience of this empty, silly popcorn-bin of a movie. Go see it, you've got the ten bucks.' But of course I don't really wonder: no newspaper editor could justify paying a hundred dollars for those two sentences. As the kids say online: House Next Door gotta eat!
I'm serious about the Matrix films, by the way: the world would be a better place if everyone who forked over forty bucks to see these pirate flicks in theaters were forced to sit down and go through Reloaded and Revolutions again. That's ambition for you, no question.
You could even call them - yes - films. But why bother?
some of the visual metaphors, especially here in At World's End, are jaw dropping in their simple beauty and effectiveness. For one: flipping the boat. That sequence alone is worth seeing this on a big screen.
No no!! Save your money and rent The Adventures of Baron Munchausen instead. A grander, smarter film in every respect.
Oh, and Matt, for whatever it's worth, I exited the theater grumbling. My 11-year-old son loved it, though. I guess seeing the smile on his face was worth losing the hearing in my left ear.
I never even made it through all of the first film, no matter how entertaining Depp was, because it was too damn long. I looked at the clock, saw that there was still another hour to go and said, "Enough." Needless to say, I haven't seen the sequels, but I would venture a guess that even though the Pirates films aren't my cup of tea, at least one of them has to be the best film ever based on a theme park ride.
I can't believe I'm going to respond. But hey, I've got time before lunchtime really hits me hard in the stomach...
Wax, if Reloaded was condensed into a first act and Revolutions was the extended second and third acts of one film, then we might be able to discuss them. However, as they are, they are not quite good movies, let alone good sequels. There's some material there but it does not quite gel the same way the Pirates movies gel. As for repeating Matt's "lazy, silly trope"... I didn't see it. It's just how I feel about movies, about art, too. Honestly. I'm sorry we, uh, I mean I, uh, offended you so. I can only hope to better next time, as ever.
Also, you did go see the movie and you did think about it and you did read this essay and you did write out a response, didn't you?
A little needle, I know, but c'mon, you threw boulders. All I want is for people to read this film as generously as they would any other film. And what is film theory if not semiotics? (Calypso's final movements are great. As is Davy's final plunge.) And what is film criticism without a little theory? How in the hell are we to evaluate what makes a good film or a bad film? Surely not strictly from a technical or a dramatic or a narrative or a generic standpoint alone. There's a lot at play, a lot at stake. It's serious, fun business, to juggle it all. And, as ever, I may make mistakes, yet I will gladly admit them, if such claims as I make play out, in the end, as unsound judgements. I think that is a good, protean standard to live by, really. We're all making mistakes all the time. But here, in this essay, I think I say all I need to say to defend my position in favor of the film.
Ed, you are probably right.
In his comment, wax banks said:
"Yes, we get it: phrases like 'narrative ruptures' carry weight among people who took any criticial-theory classes since the 70's, 'generic play' is a handy 'critical' excuse for soulless schematicism, and unnecessary hyphens in words like 're-appropriate ... re-cast and re-write' serve as evidence that this isn't just a review, but a review consisting of words - in a specific order, at that!"
I say:
Wow, the above remark doesn't sound like you "get it" at all. "narrative rupture" is a term that predates the '70s, and and even if you've taken a critical theory class, it's difficult to make meaningful sense of "generic play as a critical excuse for soulless schematism" (even with the scare quotes). The entire paragraph seems to boil down to "Ryland, you pretentious twit!"
Actually, I think Ryland was making a fairly simple, not particularly theoretical, claim: our expectations can (often) get in the way of paying attention. It sometimes can be worth the effort reflect on the sources of our enjoyment or our dismissal of films (or reviews for that matter).
I remember the first time that I saw _The Matrix_. It was the day that it opened and I saw it at Mann's Chinese Theater. I can remember thinking all the things that I thought were wrong with it from a formal standpoint. I also remember gradually becoming more and more excited as I realized the chances it was taking. At first I though it was a scifi "hero's coming of age tale." That was ok, but after _Star Wars_ nothing to write home about. By the end of the movie I was struck by how all those things I at first didn't like about _The Matrix_ actually made it something more than the classic "hero's journey" that _Star Wars_ is. I ended up enjoying _The Matrix_ but wondering how the Wachovski Brothers would meet in the next two films the challenge the first film presented. It seemed to me that they would either figure out a way to do something really different or fall back into the same old story. I believe that the _Matrix_ sequels are ultimately a failure of the imagination, and that they do fall back into the same old story. I say this after having, for a variety of reasons, watched _Reloaded_ and _Revolutions_ a number of times.
I confess that the opening scenes of the first _Pirates of the Caribbean_ movie didn't seem as awkward to me as the opening scenes of _The Matrix_. They were simply pleasant. It wasn't until the fight between Will and Jack that I began to think something interesting was going on. Things got progressively more interesting for me until by the end, I found myself feeling very much like I did after viewing _The Matrix_. Like _The Matrix_, I enjoyed it tremendously. Like _The Matrix_ I ate a huge bucket of pocorn whuile viewing it. Like _The Matrix_, I went back and saw it a second time the same day. Like the _The Matrix_, at the end I wondered how the director would meet in the next two films the challenge the first film presented. In the case of the _Pirates_ sequels, I think the challenge was taken up and met.
Accounting for what I take to be the value of _Pirates_ films would take more space than a comment allows. It's clear that both my experience and understanding of the films differs from yours. For example, I thought that the second _Pirates_ was pure pleasure and one of the two smartest films that I've seen in a long time. Only _Kung Fu Hustle_ comes close. If I was going to argue the merits of _The Pirates_ films, I might begin with why I like Jerry Lewis, and why Keira Knightley's speech works for me when Bill Pullman's didn't. : )
I lurk frequently but never post comments. Maybe this was just the day that the pointless snarkiness got to me. As said, it seems to me that Ryland is _not_ asking you to like the _Pirates_ films, he's simply suggesting 1)it's worth thinking about one's ability to pay attention to a film (think Bosley Crowther and _Bonnie and Clyde_) and 2) there are reasons why one might value and enjoy _The Pirates_ films besides having taken critical theory classes.
By the way, are you referring to the Karel Zeman version of _The Adventures of Baron Munchausen_ (way cool but doesn't seem relevant) or the Terry Gilliam version?
Though I'm sure someone somewhere will make a case for Michael Bay, I'd argue that Verbinski is the only blockbuster specialist to emerge in the past decade with a legitimate shot at attaining auteur-hood. He's a master technician with a real gift for bringing together plot, character and comedy. He's also brilliant at setup and payoff, so much so that in certain circles, a bit from one of his films has become a noun describing a throwaway line that turns out to have major consequences down the line: the "Winston", which anybody who has seen The Mexican--in my opinion, a truly brilliant comedy that seriously rewards repeat viewings--will immediately recognize. Granted, the guy who began using the term did so semipejoratively (even though he's a fan of The Mexican--nope, I'm not the only one), but you know what? Some of the greatest movies of all time have more Winstons than the R.J. Reynolds factory--a classic example being The Apartment, which is loaded with 'em.
Yet despite my championship of Verbinski, I'm embarrassed to say I still haven't caught up with either The Weather Man or At World's End. So many movies, so little time...
Wax, this ground:
But there's nothing going on in this film, Ryland...
just can't hold. Saying no to Ryland's - or any - generous reading of Pirates would either require a counter reading of the film, or an exit from the discussion (giving up in the sense of claiming you just can't enjoy the film, won't bring yourself to read it, etc.). But you can't just produce an inventory of what you didn't like about it, as evidence against the act of close reading and writing Mr. Knight published. In the end, did he read the film, or not? Your attack of his style seemed to want to substantiate a "no" answer, but again - you gotta see how that's beside the point. (Not to mention, cranky!) At best, you claimed only other films are worthy of such attention. See the circle here? The mere fact that a reading of Pirates can be produced puts it on the same level, as the same kind of cinematic object, as the films you cite against it: films that afford close readings. You can say you still don't like Pirates , but what except the very engagement with it that you obstinately refuse, could possibly justify your claim that Pirates doesn't deserve to be read? In other words, if Ryland has offered a take on Pirates' logic, on its own terms, and quite apart from the question of whether the film annoyed you, what and why you gotta hate, Wax?
You could even call them - yes - films. But why bother?
Because, that's a way to enjoy them. And occasion good critical dialogue. And spread the love.
I can't contribute much more to this discussion, except to say that Ryland's piece freaked me out a little bit, because, to use yet another damned nautical metaphor, it really sails against the wind. (I was among a handful of critics that didn't loathe "The Black Dahlia," but that wasn't as much of a stretch, because that was a dark, sad film, and thus more outwardly "serious.") I don't see myself setting aside five hours anytime soon to re-watch the second "Pirates" film and go see the third. So I can't second or refute anything Ryland says just yet. But I do think the piece is in the tradition of criticism that (a) admits total engagement with light escapist cinema, without the caveat of "guilty pleasure," and (b) tries to figure out what qualities the film exhibits that might have encouraged such a positive reaction. Such pieces necessarily expose the critic to charges that he's overthinking things, or deploying academic theory to justify having enjoyed a loud, stupid summer movie, or otherwise giving the time of day to entertainment that doesn't deserve it. But film history is filled with such pieces, some convincing, others not. My film professor at SMU, Martin Rubin, wrote an entire book analyzing the musicals of Busby Berkeley, picking apart their compositions, cutting and mythic architecture, and those movies were considered eye-and-ear candy upon first release. And I sense a groundswell of contrarian enthusiasm for Michael Bay, who I don't like very much at all. If that evolves into a full-on reassessment, I don't know if I'll be able to handle it.
I appreciate your bluntness, though, Wax -- like The Sheik, Sean Burns, Odienator and other regulars here, your honesty forces me to check my premises. And I'd like to hear a more detailed defense of the "Matrix" sequels. I liked what they were trying to do -- and I especially liked the resolution of the man-vs.-machines plot, which wasn't the apocalyptic videogame ending I expected. But on the whole I didn't feel they carried it off in a way that justified two whole films -- plus, looking back, I think that final shot in the first film of Neo taking flight amounted to a boldfaced period at the end of that story, and nothing that came after quite equaled it.
MZS: As a former Matrix fanboy (seriously, it was pretty ridiculous...dressing up on opening night and everything) and someone who still respects all the films - as terrible as elements of the last two are - I'll take you up on that offer.
Ryland: Lots of thoughts from me on this piece, very little time. Will get back to you asap.
Interesting piece but I think one of the questions that has to be asked has to do with intentionality: how much of this film was actually designed as the kind of rule-breaking narrative that RWK supposes, and how much of it just happened as a result of extra-textual marketplace demands: in particular it seemed to me that big chunks of the film existed not for any narrative reason but merely in order for Jerry Bruckheimer and Gore Verbinski to attempt to one-up the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movies. You also have the problem of big chunks of the movie not making sense, like the constant series of crosses and double-crosses which seem to only exist to add 'tension' and complication to the screenplay.
And whoever said that Verbinski was a master of set-up and payoff, I must ask: why are there so many things so poorly set up or paid off in this film? Not paid off are Calypso and the final battle with the armada of ships; not set up is Will Turner's final fate, which seems to happen for no good reason. I'm willing to credit Verbinski with being a master of crafting visuals, and balancing comedy and action, but I can't give him much credit for being able to control his sprawling, overstuffed narrative.
jeffmcm said: "Interesting piece but I think one of the questions that has to be asked has to do with intentionality..."
That's irrelevant. Haven't you ever heard of the intentional fallacy?
"Not paid off are Calypso and the final battle with the armada of ships; not set up is Will Turner's final fate, which seems to happen for no good reason."
The Calypso subplot, while confusing and poorly handled as much else in this movie, has a definite pay-off: Her encounter with Davy Jones in the brig reveals her lingering feelings for Jones and her plans to side with him once the Brethren Court freed her. In keeping with the double-crossing nature of this story, Calypso is betrayed when Will Turner reveals Jones's role in her bodily imprisonment, and in turn, she abandons Jones. The maelstrom that she creates becomes an arena in which the Pearl and the Dutchman can fight to the death, but she offers aid to nobody. Thus, the pay-off of her narrative is her epically manifested fury (forming the ultimate set-piece of the trilogy -- what greater pay-off could you want?) and circle-completing jilting of Jones, who achingly laments, "Calypso!" before he dies.
As for Will's fate, there are a number of solid reasons for it, though whether or not they are "good" is up to you: 1) It perfectly completes the narrative arc begun in part one, in which he steadfastly refuses to be involved in piracy, until Elizabeth's capture and the revelation of his father's past motivates it. In part two and most of part three, Will becomes more and more of a pirate, but only in behavior, not in spirit: He still acts out of necessity, and his double-crossing gambits in part three show his allegiance to nobody and no side. But when he becomes the captain of the Dutchman, he finally accepts his fate and his ultimate transformation into a pirate, or at least a sea-bound man. 2) In keeping with the trilogy's various mythically romantic notions, Will's eternal duty allows him to be permanently reunited with his father, another pay-off to a story arc introduced in part one and developed in part two. 3) Will's fate once again illustrates how Captain Jack is fundamentally a good man: His three-movie objective has been the freedom to sail the sea, and being captain of the Dutchman seemed offer the ultimate opportunity. But when Will is abruptly stabbed, Jack decides to be selfless and save Will's life by the only means at hand, in turn once again opening himself up to the dangers of being captured or losing his ship (which does happen). 4) What happens to Will (the stabbing, I mean) is like what happened to Janet Leigh in Psycho -- a random act of violence that unexpectedly kills a main character. Having one of those is always refreshing in mainstream movies that tend to overplot things.
Hey Ryland -
As has happened several times before, I want to apologise for the ad hominem nature of my earlier comment. You're writing what you're into and that's the right thing. I still think there's nothing going on in this film - there's no moral or critical dimension to it that's both consistent and interesting.
As for the Matrix films, that's for coming back to, not for now. I just wanna quickly respond to a couple of things:
Munchausen: the Gilliam version, the one to which the world-turned-upside-down sequence in PotC:AWE appeared to be an homage.
"narrative rupture" is a term that predates the '70s, and and even if you've taken a critical theory class, it's difficult to make meaningful sense of "generic play as a critical excuse for soulless schematism" (even with the scare quotes). The entire paragraph seems to boil down to "Ryland, you pretentious twit!"
Er, no. 'Rupture' is a term that's vastly increased in textual-critical-vocab centrality since the 60's and 70's, to the point that it's now a kind of lazy scholarly shorthand. The papers I wrote in grad school were filled with the same kind of melodramatic action-packed language as everyone else's - rupture this, suture that, crisis (of meaning, of desire, of blah blah) the other. Such gestures are stylistically tiring to read and descriptively/analytically empty; they're just gestures.
As for '"generic play' as a critical excuse for soulless schematism,' I didn't think it was too hard to figure out: often scholar-critics use the supposed 'playfulness' (another devalued word in the scholarly lexicon) of a text's handling of genre tropes as an excuse for the text's mere schematicism, i.e. the cleanness and derivativeness of its organizational scheme. That tendency leads to the elevation, in the critical pantheon, of directors whose weird hamfistedness or hermeticism (e.g. David Lynch) is easily hidden behind their compatibility with a criticize-by-numbers paradigm.
A much, much more frustrating (because more prevalent and easier to slip by) abuse of critical language is the 'this text is really a [text in a medium]' trope that popped up independently twice on this website this week. It lets the critic made an empty claim ('this film is a film') while implying that the two instances of the word 'film' mean something else. They must, after all - this is a critic, and not a normal person writing. :) Here's MZS in his reposted Road to Perdition piece:
But above all else, it’s a movie. From first frame to last, it’s defiantly a work of cinema, composed, lit, edited and shot with maximum attention to rhythm and detail; it’s always in the moment, and it builds a mood of dreamy dread and sustains it for about two hours, reeling off so many defiantly showy grace notes, and staging so many clever sequences, that after a while I stopped writing them down because my notepad was running out of paper.
That doesn't amount to a defense/praise of the film, but it's dressed as one. Look at the first two clauses. They boil down to, 'This is a film. It was crafted by attentive professionals.' Not for nothing, I'm guessing, is this trope busted out in defense of overpraised talents like Mendes and Verbinski (and I loved the first PotC film): it allows the critic to dress up competence as creativity, simultaneously appealing to a slightly self-congratulatory readerly impulse (watching movies is special) while preserving analytical distance/superiority (I have detected cleverness that you, reader, will experience only secondhand). Writing stuff like that feels great, but it's kind of a double-edged sword: yes it's important that filmgoers become increasingly aware of what film is good at and the means by which filmmakers manipulate audiences to empower stories, but that awareness can not substitute for moral/aesthetic seriousness, integrity, and risk-taking. The Pirates movies, like (e.g.) American Beauty, take absolutely no risks. The audience doesn't give a damn that there's a loopy hallucination sequence early on in PotC:AWE; it'll walk out of the theatre pumped up by the action-packed finale. (And let's be honest: as neat as that sequence is, it's nothing special. We all grew up on Chuck Jones cartoons, right?)
jen said:
The mere fact that a reading of Pirates can be produced puts it on the same level, as the same kind of cinematic object, as the films you cite against it: films that afford close readings.
You don't really believe this is a meaningful metric, do you jen? You don't really think bored movie critics are the sole arbiters of aesthetic worth, do you? And you don't actually think that there's no difference in depth between transparently, atomically disparate films and film types? Take careful stock of what you're really defending here. Ryland's reading boils down to this:
Good sequels disrupt the orders established in their predecessors. [Debatable, and R. has picked two debatable but very interesting examples.] "The main thrust of this trilogy is that reckoning: How will we live in the world when our autonomous freedom is continually challenged? [...] Piracy is by rights unlawful, yet it may in fact be a more righteous life in these films' mythology. [...] Yet, this [pirate-living] utopia is one not even a pirate can claim dominion over. It is a plane to be sailed across, not penetrated or bent to one's will. This is Davy Jones' failure. [...] [The following is an emblematic unpacking of a moment from the film:] After flipping the boat into the water, with the upside down and the downside up, the sea rushes past the deck, equalizing the space again — righting the world's end, the sea's plane, and exposing the Locker's sunset as the Caribbean's sunrise. Like Jack's newfound lease on life, the day is beginning anew, on the sea. [...] It is for this reason the Pirates sequels are so routinely railed against: they sure-handedly undo the first film’s utopian logic. They complicate that film’s utopia just as the trilogy, on the whole, complicates the utopia of the sea, and one’s freedom upon it, and within the world.'
...which boils down further to this: The story of PotC is an exploration of the circumscription of utopian fantasies, particularly that of piracy-as-rugged-freedom, by the reality of the (mythological) sea.'
Reasonable enough? And yes, that would be a perfectly reasonable reading of the film if the film weren't constantly falling short of Ryland's secondary narrative, his critical imposition, which in the end has basically nothing to do with the actual onscreen narrative. Remember, the big long-awaited payoff to PotC:AWE is a 40 minute battle that doesn't actually take place - the point of the final confrontation, we're told for two hours, is the pirates standing up to the Brits, but in the end a strange spatial telescoping effect means that Calypso affects only the two ships - all she ever cared about was getting Jones, in spite of everything we've been led to believe about her character. The first film is more profitably distilled to nothing more complex than 'Piracy is neato!' and Pryce's final line to a snazzy one-liner. (Piracy is reduced and excused from horror to comedy within five minutes of the Pearl's arrival in Will Tanner's town - just in time for him to throw on the motley and go sailin'. His later suffering doesn't even amount to 'careful what you wish for': he wishes for piracy and the girl, and get 'em both.) The Elizabeth/Norrington/Will triangle is pure genre space-filler, since it's obvious from the get-go how it will come out, and if Norrington is slightly interesting (in his willingness to bend the rules), he is so in a very basic wish-fulfillment way. The first sequel makes him even more interesting; the third disposes of him to fulfill a plot function. Will and Elizabeth get married onboard the Pearl and are bound by true love, etc., but can't get together really, which corresponds neatly enough to a Big Structure (even the one Ryland's sketching), but all the supposed complexities of love and friendship at sea distill rather dully in the PotC series to (1) don't fuck around and (2) don't chain up women, literally or figuratively. Oh, and while we're at it, (3) Jack Sparrow isn't a character, he's a machine for generating plot and punchlines. The Will/Jack/Liz intrigue is even thinner, since there's no reason to believe any of it.
Moreover, the sequels don't actually address this utopian fantasy directly except to the extent that they must in order to justify their wider narrative scope (purely at the level of event, rather than meaning). So yes, an eight-year-old boy gets hung at the beginning of At World's End, and there's singing from the accused. But that's in the film to sell Beckett's villainy, and it doesn't comment on the piracy-as-ultimate-freedom trope of the first film, since it's contrasted with the overwrought McGuffin-chasing action of the first sequel rather than Curse's hijinks. The second film is supposedly concerned with the fate of the sea and its denizens in general, but that's a really, really generous reading of a three-hour search for a magical power-up complete with Psych-101 side-quests for each character. The preoccupation with each characters' 'heart's desire' would seem to back up Ryland's utopia/anti-utopia reading, were it not for the ease and casualness with which every single character reverts happily to type when the story calls for it: Barbossa is a stunt-casting plot device who adds nothing but convenience to the third film, Jack is a troublemaker out to do for himself, Will is a true-hearted dope who ends up tragically living forever because his quick-thinking dad makes him so, Elizabeth is merely the firebrand who wants to settle down with the right man (all this pirate talk when she really wants a coastal estate and a kid). Beckett is just the baddie. What do these people 'really want' in the end? Exactly what you'd expect of each of them. (That's why the magical compass never holds any surprises for the audience, as fantastic a plot device as it is.)
The third film does widen its scope - there're goofy Asians and one goofy Caribbean woman and even a handful of goofy Indians, yay! - but as I've said twice already, all this 'assemble the pirates' talk amounts to nothing at all. Death is a joke and the Big War at Sea is just a framing device for the personal drama being played out on the Pearl and Jones's ship. Which isn't terribly complex either - it's just serviceable. If the cast weren't such a pleasure (even Orlando Bloom demands viewer attention in the third film) the lines would be bombs.
And oh yeah, about that speech of Knightley's: where does it come from? It's clear that it's a bid in part to legitimate the whole pirate-rebellion thing, which should be morally troubling (after all pirates were murderers, thieves, rapists, and so forth - the whole 'Pirate Code' thing is a Disney smokescreen to allow them to be heroes in the first place). What does she say? 'We'll show these British assholes what freedom looks like.' Turns out it looks an awful lot like someone left Master and Commander on pause while running a a digitally-enhanced Errol Flynn movie for a half-hour. What is its point? Nothing at all. She makes the speech, then the Pearl goes to do what it's supposed to do, closing out the film's personal plots (and incidentally massacring every sailor on the British flagship, by the way), and the fact that all the pirate flags are flying doesn't fit into any plot as such - it's only a gesture. More specifically, it's a Neat Visual Moment, of which the film is full to overflowing, but you knew that, since it's a premise of this blog post.
I'm not saying it's impossible to construct an alternate critical narrative like Ryland's - he obviously wrote one. In my first post I was complaining that he was utilizing empty tropes to buttress a too-sketchy apology for a simplistic, hamfisted film (that Calypso/Davy Jones conversation is a goddamn mess, folks, along with their entire subplot, and the fact that it's Bill Nighy doing the CGI crying doesn't excuse it). Ryland's is an engaging enough apology for the film, but it's not really 'close reading' by any stretch: you need a lot more than three paragraphs of textual detail to support a claim like 'the Pirates movies not only aren't the fluff everyone thinks they are, but actually make a coherent, complex point about utopias and collective/self-determination.' Rather, this post amounts to a (pretty well-written for its genre) example of a film-critical type, complete with fairly common critical-vocab habits and the usual elevation of competence to meaning. It's common among comic book apologists, for instance. Line to line the first Pirates film was snazzy, and its story was tight-but-complicated; but there's never been anything complex about it. The 'sea as complex negotiated "utopia"' reading demands that the film be concerned in some way with its subject, but the presence of a light thematic veneer doesn't mean there's anything interesting going on in these popcorn flicks. I don't care that the film was made to generate shitloads of money for Disney; why else would Disney make any films at all? I care that it was too long, too convenient, too pointlessly loud and busy, too emotionally simplistic, too cheesy, and in the end (as weird as this is to say) too reliant on the demented genius of Johnny Depp, elevating a showstopping supporting performance to uneasy centrality. Structurally, the PotC sequels are complicated but not deep. Thematically merely simple. Line to line they're clunky in ways the original wasn't.
MZS, you said:
But I do think the piece is in the tradition of criticism that (a) admits total engagement with light escapist cinema, without the caveat of "guilty pleasure," and (b) tries to figure out what qualities the film exhibits that might have encouraged such a positive reaction.
Eh? I was totally engaged; it was a loudly mediocre film. I'm sure as hell not talking about guilty anything. I suspect, cynically I admit, that Ryland was probably more interested in academic criticism as such than in the layer-upon-layer of utopian criticism in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. i.e. He came looking for something and found it, but that doesn't say much about the movies themselves.
I generally admire the effort to help people see hidden value in film. In this case I think such effort amounts, for various reasons and in various ways, to an academic exercise that does more harm than good (little of each), not least because it redirects attention to a pretty empty-headed action film best experienced as a momentary diversion, soon forgotten.
And that's ~2,500 words on why we shouldn't waste our time talking about this sort of thing. Huzzah! :)
Wax: Honestly, my "Road to Perdition" piece wasn't saying, "It's a movie, hooray!"
What I trying to say -- and I clearly didn't articulate it well enough, otherwise I wouldn't have to clarify myself in this thread -- was that because it was consciously intended as a movie about atmosphere, very basic themes, myth and dream imagery and visceral pleasures; and because it didn't have a tightly-wound plot; and because it was made by Sam Mendes, who's loathed by many on general principle, it didn't get the fair or attentive hearing I thought it deserved.
"Perdition" is one in a long line of such movies, some of which are now acknowledged as intelligent, perhaps even great, even though the made similar style choices that opened them to charges that they were just pretty pictures. "Night of the Hunter," "The Outsiders," "Johnny Handsome," "Blade Runner" and, yes, "Miami Vice" have all been blasted in similar language.
Interesting that "Night of the Hunter" ascended into the pantheon of Indisputable Classics rather quickly, despite its simplistic dialogue, cardboard characters, truly Manichean morality and what one must label--if one is to be consistent about such things, as we really ought to be, since we're supposedly trying to devise semi-objective criteria for measuring "good" and "bad"--its simplistic symbolism. On its face, "Hunter" is no more subtle than "Revenge of the Sith" or "Road to Perdition." Good is represented by children and a purehearted old lady, and the villain is a fake preacher and remorseless sadist who sings in a creepy way and has "Love" and "Hate" tattooed on his knuckles -- and in case you didn't intuit how that relates to the film's themes, there's a scene where he explains it!
We might disagree on whether any or all of the above films are worth a serious appraisal. But I think we can agree that they privilege sound and picture over dialogue, and that they are designed not simply to be watched, but to be experienced. The are primarily opportunities to visit a different imaginative space, or, if you prefer, they're visionary spectacle. (Pretty pictures.) Judged by standard commercial narrative yardsticks, they have to be considered failures, but why should they be judged that way--found guilty of failing to satisfy rules they disregarded in the first place? It's like complaining that a poem isn't a short story. Or that the sun isn't the moon.
I realize it's nearly impossible to make a convincing case for such films to anyone who isn't already inclined to enjoy them. Factor out the "academic" language -- which in this particular discussion seems to be code for "an attempt to take seriously that which is inherently unworthy of being taken seriously" -- and you're left with the same basic exchange: "Man, that movie really did it for me," vs., "Well, it didn't do it for me." That's a frustrating fact that critics as a species often have a hard time acknowledging, but it's a fact of life. Just as the core of the human personality is a mystery, so is the most visible extension of that personality, one's own sense of taste--what's good and bad, defensible and not.
Roger Ebert's review of Mike Figgis' "Stormy Monday" probably explained my point of view better than I did. It was not a standard review, but a collection of sentences describing moments and images from the movie. There is no point to that movie other than its overpowering noir-ness. Perhaps that makes it an inherently second-rate (or third-rate) movie, not worth recommending as anything but a guilty pleasure (there's that phrase again). But my God, Melanie Griffith looks gorgeous, Tommy Lee Jones is menacing, the streets are all cobblestone and neon, and there's so much rain it's as if the the whole city is weeping. I'd like to watch it again. Like, now.
I never apologized for liking this film, or any film.
Wax:
I haven't seen Gilliam's _Baron Munchausen_ since its theatrical release. What I remember about the film is being struck by Uma Thurman's incredible beauty and thinking that Oliver Reed hadn't lost any of the animal vitality he displayed in _Women in Love_. That was 17 years ago and I was in many ways generally less attentive then. I'll put the film in my Netflix queue.
I won't speak for Ryland, but I can honestly say that the merits I find in the _Pirates_ films are not the product of an academic exercise. When reading your remarks I found myself continually thinking of aspects of a scene that you ignore or relations between scenes that you don’t discuss, all of which call into question claims that you make. Your reading of the final battle scene in _At World's End_ is nothing like my experience of it.
There’s a lot I would claim for these films. Like some silent film comedies and, yes, some cartoons, the _Pirate_ films speak to me of aspects of my experience that are not captured in films that invoke and satisfy criteria of narrative linearity and closure, individual agency, and compositional unity (of a very specific sort). For me the _Pirates_ movies move away from these principles of classical Hollywood cinema while at the same time presenting a thematic justification for this movement. I think that I could support this claim with a detailed analysis of the films and their scenes in relation to one another. However, when all is said and done, it may come to down to differences in our criteria for judging films. A claim for the merits of a film seems also to be a claim for the merits of our criteria for judging films which can seem (perhaps is) a claim for our own merit. This may be why the ad hominems are so difficult to avoid.
Lord, Wax, if that's a "quick response to a couple of things", what could you accomplish if you really sat down and devoted some time to a topic?
Still haven't seen the film and so won't comment other than to tell Ryland I really enjoyed reading this.
My 2 cents'....the Calypso maelstrom ending was lifted from The Little Mermaid. At least Disney was stealing from themselves.
Wow. I am COMPLETELY in agreement with Wax Banks' analysis of both the Pirate Trilogy and Ryland W K's article.
I admire and enjoy the thought that all of you at House put into thinking about film+tv in a way that reflects what these things mean to us, but occasionally I think you overreach in the desire to create (or uncover, I suppose) through the magic of textural analysis a core of meaning where there is none.
For me, it really just comes down to this: the first film was surprisingly enjoyable because it was simply very well made entertainment that, rarely enough these days, didn't cheat, didn't oversell its characters and didn't insult your intelligence.
The second took the goodwill built up in the first and squandered it. The third is so desparate to top the other two that it can only resort to gigantism in order to bludgeon the viewer into submission. Yes, I have never seen This Effect before; you win.
Anything else I'd say would be repetition since it was said so elegantly already. Ridiculously overblown and convoluted writing from R W K - worth trying, and worth reading for the way it engendered a response that was truly insightful.
The hullabaloo about this movie seems to have died down, and kudos to Ryland for his defense of Pirates--passionate and intricate both, even if I dislike all three of the Pirate movies, all three Matrix movies, AND all five Star Wars movies (with the exception of Empire) with a passion.
So I'll try keep it simple. Not enough Depp. Some Rush appreciated. Too much Knightly and Bloom.
Wholesale theft from Gilliam's Baron Munchausen (Wax called it right, there). The marriage in the midst of battle is a cute idea, but wretchedly executed, and pointless, since I warmed to neither character (the marriage that ends The African Queen, on the other hand, while far less complicated, was enchating precisely because I bought into both characters).
Naomie Harris is wasted; Chow Yun Fat is wasted; Chow confusing Knightly for Calypso is totally unnecessary and confusing. Developing these two at the expense of the vanilla lovers would have been a step in the right direction.
Best scene is the multiple Depps (he's an axiom, I think; one can't have too much of him in a bad movie). As for people who show promise handling digitally enhanced, big-budget epics, I'd rather look at Zhang Yimou's latest efforts.
Weighing in again, having finally seen the damn thing: I enjoyed it, a lot more than I expected to. I wasn't bored, either, which surprised me greatly. It seemed that every few minutes there was something really spectacular to look at.
It was, however, exhausting (or maybe that's just me.) Wax complained about setups without payoffs, but I disagree, much preferring to see the maelstrom-bound battle between the Pearl and the Dutchman, in which we can follow the fates of the characters we actually know, than some huge generic naval battle.
Also, I think it's important to understand why the "British" fleet fell away after their flag ship was destroyed: they weren't the Navy, they were merchant vessels. The pirates weren't fighting the King, they were fighting the East India Trading Company. This bit of convolution brought to mind the similar idiocies with Trade Federations and what-not in The Phantom Menace, but it's not trivial. You'll note that the uniforms were not red coats, which was a big visual cue that these guys weren't working directly for the king anymore.
I actually enjoyed the crossings and double-crossings, particularly the bit with Will and Jack conspiring to get the East Indian fleet, and more importantly the Flying Dutchman, to Shipwreck Cove. The only things that really irked me were Sao Fat mistaking Swann for Calypso (plausible but only with fan-wanking), and Elizabeth's speech, which I could've done without.
If we just drop (or ignore) the whole pirates-for-freedom conceit, the whole thing comes off pretty well, with one commercial enterprise (piracy) battling against another, with far superior support (East India Trading Co.) If we're forced to confront the issue, it boils down to "one man's terrorist (or pirate) is another man's freedom fighter," which could actually be OK in some contexts but in this one should emphatically not be. But this film positions the East India Trading Company as a much greater evil than the pirates ever were, which is supposed to convince us that it's OK to suddenly make the pirates the good guys. We can all see where they were trying to go with that, and just as easily see what a huge gaffe it was -- but with the eye candy and the pacing and the other, more plausible (in context) plot lines, it was easy for me to just ignore all that guff and let the rest of the movie wash over me. I could say a lot more about the themes of imprisonment and freedom, and how just about everyone was freed from various prisons of their own or other's makings, but I won't -- I will say, though, that I thought the resolution of the two Turner's story was satisfying, as was Jack Sparrow's proving, once again, that he sometimes can be a good man.
joan's assessment of the movie (cutthroats in competition) sounds pretty good, and I'd subscribe to it provided they cut Bloom and Knightley's throats in the first fifteen minutes of the picture. They act like an anchor, dragging down the picture the way the two lovers always did in the Marx Brothers' MGM pictures.
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