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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Topic: Pirates of the Caribbean 3 - At World's End (2007)
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Mitchell Dvoskin
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1869
From: West Milford, NJ, USA
Registered: Jan 2001
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posted 05-24-2007 08:17 AM
What Brad said.
Give me some scissors and some splicing tape, and I good make a better 90 minute movie out of that mess. The film would still suck, but at least it would be over faster.
What were they thinking? The first Pirates movie was a lot of fun, with humor, romance, and action. The second Pirates movie did nothing for me, and for this one, Disney owes me 3 hours of my life back. This film is almost devoid of humor, unless you happen to think that J. Depp prancing around is funny in and of itself. It was overly complicated, took itself far to seriously, and dragged on way too long.
Another triumph of CGI over story telling.
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Mark J. Marshall
Film God
Posts: 3188
From: New Castle, DE, USA
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted 05-24-2007 02:56 PM
Oh my goodness... I was so looking forward to this movie, and it's the freakin Matrix all over again. ARG! Hollywood is in trouble. I think it's safe to say it now. They really have no clue why the first Pirates was such a hit. I don't know how many times this has to happen, but it seems like any original movie that proves to be a huge box office hit ends up being an complete and absolute accident.
When I saw the first Pirates, at the point where Mr. Gibbs and Jack Sparrow said "Take what you can... Give nothing back..." I actually snapped out of the movie for a moment and thought, "Holy cow, this movie is incredible." And I left feeling like I had just watched Raiders Of The Lost Ark for the first time. The second one seemed like it was off base a little bit, but I was willing to give it credit for being the awkward story in the middle. With this movie, I couldn't wait for it to end. If I wasn't the guy running the show, I probably would have left about 1/3 of the way into it.
Hollywood is completely devoid of people who understand how to tell a good story, captivate an audience, and make a two hour escape that's fun. Where was the fun adventurous music? Where was the mystery and suspense and romance and action? Who were the bad guys? For that matter, who were the good guys? What the hell happened here??
So, I think it's over guys and gals. Pack it in. Start looking for a job in another industry, because this one is done.
HOW DO YOU SCREW UP PIRATES OF THE FREAKIN CARIBBEAN??? ![[Mad]](mad.gif)
The good news is that our print had a little bit of a static problem or something around one of the splices which caused the film to jam in the brain, which caused the projector to chew up about six feet of it. So one of our three prints is now about four seconds shorter than it was, which in this case is a good thing.
Matt G. and the gang know how to tell a good story, and I know the Harry Potter story is a good one. So it looks like I still have The Simpsons and Harry Potter to look forward to this summer. And I still have high hopes for Transformers and Die Hard - even though Die Hard looks like it's trying to pack the entire movie into the trailer. Ugh.
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John Wilson
Film God
Posts: 5438
From: Sydney, Australia.
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 05-25-2007 03:21 PM
So do the people that made it!
![[evil]](graemlins/evil.gif)
Here's Paul Byrnes' review from the Sydney Morning Herald...it hit the nail on the head...
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http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/05/25/1179601639598.html?from=top5
The first Pirates of the Caribbean was long and sometimes tedious but it had the advantage of being funny - at least when Captain Jack Sparrow was waving his arms and stumbling around like a drunken sailor, which indeed, he was.
Johnny Depp's characterisation of the pirate as rock star, basing his performance on the shipwrecked grandeur of Keith Richards, was inspired and beguiling. Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom added a delicate upper-crust English beauty to balance the scales and form a love triangle. In order to have fights, they needed someone to hold the other sword and that was Geoffrey Rush, as Captain Barbossa, the ghost with the worst dental hygiene on the Spanish Main (but the biggest hat).
When the dialogue reached an exhausted impasse - and that was often - Barbossa and his band of scurvy cut-throat ghosts would steal the ship, start a fight, strand somebody on an island or, if necessary, turn upon each other. Director Gore Verbinski kept this up for 143 minutes, some kind of bum-numbing record for a comedy.
The huge success of the first movie meant that the second and third sequel were shot back to back. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer saved millions in sets and staff and was able to get both movies out just 10 months apart. Given that Dead Man's Chest made twice as much money as the original, he's hoping that At World's End will bring home a third mountain of treasure.
It will make a squillion but the truth is it's not very good. The faults of the first movie are still there, only more so, and it doesn't have the benefit of being fresh. At 168 minutes, it's also longer than either of its brothers, which is just ridiculous. Never mind the quality, feel the length. Worse still, the plot is incoherent and half the movie seems to be taken up with static scenes where the characters try to explain it or complicate it with yet another revelation. It's really a continuation of the second film, rather than a new movie, so if you missed Dead Man's Chest it's even harder to follow.
Here's my attempt to unravel the mystery of the initial set-up (don't worry, this is just the basics). Jack Sparrow died at the end of Dead Man's Chest but he's one of the nine pirate Lords and he has one of the magic pieces of eight that they need for a meeting of the pirate Brethren, so they have to get him back to the land of the living, which means going to Davy Jones's locker. The pirates who were dead in the first movie are all alive again now, back in full bodies but no less filthy. They are led by Captain Barbossa but they lack a ship; nor do they know how to get to world's end, so they try to steal a secret map from the powerful Captain Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat), lord of the Singapore pirates.
Meanwhile, Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander), the unscrupulous local head of the East India Company, has gained control of Davy Jones (Bill Nighy, wearing an octopus head) and his ghost ship, the Flying Dutchman, by obtaining the box in which Jones's heart is kept. Beckett uses Jones as his secret weapon, at the head of a mighty armada, but Jones is secretly pining for his lost love, the sea goddess Calypso, who's in human form (Naomie Harris) on Barbossa's ship, a junk borrowed from Sao Feng, now heading through the ice to ... Oh, who cares? It's all stuff and nonsense anyway, with no purpose other than to occupy great amounts of time between the set-piece battles. That's normal in this kind of film - but it has to be done right or it's boring.
In the first film, most of that work was shouldered by Jack Sparrow, doing his vaudeville routine, with Barbossa in support. There's still some of that banter in the new one, but far too many scenes where the dialogue is about nothing we can care about. Oh dear, the Flying Dutchman must always have a captain; the Pirate King is the only one who can say when they go to war; the nine pieces of eight must be brought together in one place before ... This world has more rules than Tolkien ever dreamed of and more bad dialogue than the last three Star Wars films put together.
In all this miserable talk, there are times when something good happens. One of the best is Sparrow's introductory scene, where we see him running his ship with a crew comprising other versions of himself, all of whom displease him. Another is when the real Keith Richards turns up as one of the pirate lords and Jack Sparrow asks him how he survived. The surrealism could have saved the movie but it's too busy inventing more of the rules-for-play that give structure to video games (the audience this film wants to court).
Why bother inventing interesting characters if you're not going to use them properly? No one went to the first two films to see skeletons fighting with swords, did they? They went to see Johnny Depp's amazing performance and to have a laugh. Depp does his best again but he's captain of a sinking ship in this instalment. At wit's end, more like it.
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